Second Section: Aesthetic Form

Chapter 16: Unity, Limits, Form

a) Multiplicity of form

One encounters the concept of form everywhere in aesthetics. It is unavoidable, because form is that to which beauty is attached. Just for that reason, the concept of form becomes so easily incommunicable for aesthetics, for it is form in all its kinds that constitutes the aesthetical question. In this sense, we rejected, in the Introduction, the idea of an aesthetics of form as almost tautological, because the opposition of “form and content” cannot be maintained: the artistic content is essentially itself form.

But now it has become clear, from various standpoints, that one must nevertheless take the concept of aesthetical form very seriously. First there is the opposition to matter: since every art has its specific matter, and every kind of matter can have only certain kinds of form bestowed upon it, so it is apparent that here there must already lie a foundation for further distinctions within the concept of form.

Second, the representational arts are concerned with the bestowal of form upon a “material” (themes, sujets), and this is apparently quite different from the forming of matter – though it stands in a very definite reciprocal relation to it, as the treatment of specific material is not possible in every kind of matter.

Third, next to beauty in the relation of appearance there is another beauty in the pure play with form. We encountered this idea of beauty in ornamental art –yet not only there, but also in music and architecture, and even in certain forms of natural beauty. (We will see that its limits are thereby also drawn too tightly. This kind of beauty plays a large role otherwise, but that still remains to be studied.)

A problem has already been encountered as to how it is possible for two kinds of bestowal of form to be given upon one and the same work: one upon the material, and one upon the matter. Both must obviously be quite different kinds of form. Nonetheless, the most intimate relation of the one kind of form to the other must exist; for, since the dispute about the “Laocoön” it is no longer argued that not any material can be given form in any given matter. But how are we to understand this tight connection between them?

Apparently, the situation must be such that the bestowal of form upon some material is at the same time the forming of matter; otherwise, one could never speak of the “forming of material in some matter.” But that means that we have two opposed elements of one act of bestowing form, thus with two domains of what is unformed and needful of form, for both are also easily distinguishable, as in literature: the bestowal of form (222) upon language and to thematic material. What are given form are, on the one hand, characters and their destinies, and on the other, words, sentences, verses.

Here it is no longer a question of the unity of a multiplicity, as otherwise in all kinds of bestowing form, but of the unity of two manifolds, indeed quite heterogeneous ones. We have arrived now at a problem that immediately brings with itself some further implications. For in fact the two named kinds of form are not the only ones; there are more of them.

We can see already from this point in what direction we are moving. Clearly we are headed toward the conclusion that in a work of art – and perhaps in every aesthetic object – each stratum has its own kind of form; and then the next question would be: how this form, graduated in various ways, is structured within itself, i.e., how this heterogeneity of different forms, each lifting itself over the one before it, is able nonetheless to constitute a unity that is moreover able to make itself felt as such in the act of beholding it.

We should not assume that this is a simple matter. It might appear at first that we have here merely an opposition of ontological modes – the real foreground and the unreal background, corresponding to the bestowal of form upon matter and the shaping of the “material,” but, as was shown in the previous five chapters, that turned out to be an oversimplification. Rather it is a question of the entire splitting open of the background down to its most inner regions, and, consequently of the entire series of strata in the aesthetic object, where apparently each of these strata is subject to its own shaping – one not dependent upon the others, but yet peculiar to itself.

This must be true just as far as the stratification of the object reaches. For there are also very simple non-stratified objects (as in ornament). And it is clear that the complexity of the problem of form grows with the increasing richness of the series of strata; thus, it would be at its greatest extent in literature, for example.

From this, it is immediately evident why the aesthetical problem of form has produced so few results up to now, although much ingenuity has been devoted to it. The failure of theory has perhaps been felt nowhere more painfully than here. At the same time it must be noted that, even with a new procedure that begins with the entire series of strata of the work of art, we cannot hope to obtain a quick solution to the problem of aesthetical form. We must not get our hopes up too high.

Why is this so? Because we cannot follow the various features of aesthetical form through all the strata. We have done much if we are able to point out single characteristic elements of them in individual strata. Artistic form itself, in fact –even if this were true only for one single stratum – is inaccessible to analysis. We can say only a few things about it, and, in general, only in the case of the external strata. Why does just this particular form – purely in itself, without any further transparency – seem beautiful, why does the slightest (223) alteration of it destroy the impression? Aesthetics cannot hope to provide an answer. It is just in this that the imponderable mystery of art consists; it belongs in a region whose laws even the artist does not comprehend, but he can adhere to them only out of the reliable and certain feelings of his genius.

b) Unity of multiplicity

What is at stake here is precisely the unity of form. The nature of the problem lies in the fact that with every increase in the depth of one’s analysis of the problem of form one sees oneself drawn increasingly into the multiplicity and away from the unity. But that is of course quite to be expected. For all unity is unity of some multiplicity, and it is not possible to understand such unity when one has not learned how to understand the kind and the dimensions of multiplicity whose unity it is presumed to be.

Now there is a categorical law that a unity is all the more powerful as the multiplicity, which it is to master, is richer and more diverse. To understand this thesis correctly, one must consider all the categorial levels of multiplicity and unity. One begins with the simple mathematical unities, rises then to the structural unities in nature, to organic life, to species-life, to the unity of consciousness, to the unity of the community, of the objective spirit and of historical life. Everywhere there appear different multiplicities, and they are mastered in different ways.

Naturally, at the same time, the complexity of the multiplicity is continuously increasing, and it becomes more difficult to master its elements; and the kinds of unity that is to master them become correspondingly higher and more subtle. But along with the “height,” its capacity to become disrupted, to be led astray, even its fragility, increases. Organic unity is more fragile than mere dynamic unity; psychic unity is more easily disrupted than the unity of the living body, and so forth.

But that means that with each higher level, the unity of a structure becomes ever more imperfect; and the highest kinds of unity are not the most perfect, but rather the least so. Categorially, that is the way things stand in general. We have already encountered the reciprocal relation of height and perfection from another perspective.

For aesthetics, we may draw the following conclusions. No one can doubt that the aesthetic object stands fairly high among the constructs belonging to this series. We need only ask whether it obtains this position due to its perfection or its ontological height.

Think first of perfection: it is the “beautiful” object that we affirm and enjoy because of its form; and how could that be otherwise, if its unity were not the most perfect mastery of multiplicity? Yet that is not so. For in all regions of beauty we deal also with the ugly! Nowhere, neither in the arts nor in nature are things so constituted that (224) all may be “beautiful,” that all conforms to laws of form and unity – steadily and inviolably.

This phenomenon is best known to us in the case of man, whose ugliness often strikes us because we are especially sensitive to it. But the same is true also, even in the arts themselves, which consciously strive to create only what is beautiful. There are failures even there.

What does that mean at this point? It means, if we may express it in the categories of unity and multiplicity, that artistic unity by no means always knows how to master the multiplicity that it is dealing with (e.g., that of some given “material”). There are cases in which the multiplicity runs through its fingers –the painter who loses himself in details, the poet who brings together a huge mass of details, material, amusing tangents, but who neglects the composition of the whole. Even in music, we find the same phenomena: the music lacks a clear layout, lacks form and unity.

It is clear that aesthetical unity, through which a thing becomes a work of art, must in all cases be created. Art does not exist in multiplicity – which is quite different from nature, where entirely unintegrated multiplicities are rarely to be found. In return, art is also a unity of a different kind, a different type – and, in general, a higher type. To create this unity of a higher type is the job of art. As opposed to what is merely given, this unity must be beheld intuitively; indeed, it must be invented (intuited) in the inward act of beholding.

In the non-representational arts, that is immediately apparent; here the multiplicity is not taken from any given material, but is produced as a free play with form itself. Then even its unity, that with which it is held together, must be produced along with it. In any case, the intuited unity alone makes itself felt here also as a principle of selection. In the representational arts, we come across a different relation to multiplicity, because the latter is given with the theme. But since the material is taken from life, and life is unlimited in its multiplicity, the intuited principle of unity must engage in the process of selection in a new and different sense, that is, it must determine the segment of the whole that will be given direct representation.

c) Selection and the setting of limits

Thus the third essential element in this context has also been sketched: the element of selecting and limiting. What is specifically required is a selection from among the multiplicity that is immediately given, or otherwise provided (by the imagination), and a limitation of what in reality are the limitless interconnections of a thing. It is one of the first features of the aesthetical standpoint, that in it the art object separates itself from the contexts of life, leaves them behind and creates new contexts for itself (Introduction, § 5); this has proven valid in all art forms (a different space, different light, a (225) different time and a different life …). But limiting in aesthetics does not refer to these alone.

For these all are merely external limitations, only a separation over against the given real context; the work of art conjures up a different piece of the world and places it before our eyes, and therefore requires the phenomenon of a frame in order to intensify the fact of being extracted. But it is not merely a question of that. The work of art requires still another limitation of multiplicity; we may call that the inner limitation. But this is meant only as a figure of speech.

Any material for representation, whether it be given through the senses or by the imagination, brings with itself a vast multiplicity; and the more concretely it is understood, so much richer it becomes. This multiplicity cannot be taken up completely by the work, for it would burst its bounds, confuse it, rob it of clear intuitive unity, and thus make even its shaping into a unity impossible.

This multiplicity can be dealt with in only one way: by a selection of what is essential for the work of art – that is, of what is essential for the appearance of the additional inner strata. This artistic phenomenon is called “omission,” and it refers to the leaving out of detail. That is strange in itself, for of course the strength of a work of art lies precisely in the fact that it contains details, and speaks of nothing except by means of them. We recall that this is in contrast to the nature of the concept and to many philosophical theories, to which details are external.

This is just what the arts do in fact: they limit themselves – always from within quite specific perspectives – to broad lines, and of course to those that matter. The sculptor does not imitate every small irregularity, although these may very well contribute to the living quality of the work. The painter chooses certain qualities of light and shade, and neglects thousands of others; he does not paint every little speck on a tree, not every blade of grass in a meadow, but rather indicates such forms with miserly strokes; he can on occasion employ only coarse strokes such as we never “see” in real life. He can just rely upon the eyes of the viewers: their eyes will easily be able to fill out the tree and meadow, if they follow the artist’s intentions; and what has been indicated with frugal means will satisfy the viewer.

We find an extreme of this kind in the drawing technique of many great draftsmen: often just a few lines are needed to make an entire figure in motion appear, or even to present a bit of landscape with traits that are entirely characteristic (Rembrandt’s etchings).

The art of filling-out or supplementation in perceptual cognitions is of course quite essential in such cases. Without it, omission of features would be merely negative, a modus deficiens. But the opposite is shown to be true: we see this fact in the urge to add to a thing, to complete it. Here the sole matter of significance (226) is that the artist retain the leadership role in his suggestive sketching. Otherwise, the process of synthetic presentation would lose itself in acts of supplementation, make itself independent, and thus no longer be the work of the artist, but something quite different.

The process of omission is even more prominent in literature. How is it at all possible to encompass a large piece of human destiny within the space of just a few scenes? Destiny consists, after all, in a series of continuous events passing from moment to moment through months and years. A play, however, and within its larger space a novel, forces these events together in a narrow series of scenes –a series so narrow as is never the case in life, when measured neither by its concentration nor by the coherence of its content.

The two last observations are important for understanding the situation: life draws events – which cohere closely in respect to their meaning – far apart from each other, and thereby a person (the living observer) loses the sense of the interrelatedness of the events that are there before his eyes. In contrast, the dramatist gets rid of everything that is not essential in these interrelations that could impede the understanding of them. In this way, he makes poetic the course of events; he lets their unity stand solidly before us, in short, he “shapes” them from the inside out.

Here, too, the “shaping into unity” is essentially a function of omission and selection: that he selects in a certain way is precisely the compositional phase of the dramatist’s art; he selects in such manner that within the most limited theatrical space the largest and richest set of possible interrelated events are made to appear. Much pertains to this effort, for example, that the background story be woven into the scenes so that they may appear along with the staged events, without having to be “recited” in a pedestrian way. For similar reasons, the events taking place between the scenes must be expressed in a recognizable way during the performance. This is true not just of drama alone.

One should not imagine that this inner “limitation of multiplicity,” the process of “omitting,” etc. is as negative as the terms used suggest. All limitation that proceeds from the essence of the material is at the same time a kind of fixing, which is a positive determination. That is in general true in the ontological sense, but here it has a particular meaning. What is positive here lies in the supplementation by means of cognition in the intuitive consciousness; one may say: in the appearance of that which is not given directly to the senses. There are equivalent expressions for the same state of affairs.

Yet how does it come about that different observers, who each must make up for what has been left out, do not supplement different things, but instead one and the same things, e.g., scenes that are not represented or narrated are still concretely before one’s eyes by means of hints from the creator? For this is what is at stake here, and only when these conditions are met does the literary work affect us each as one and the same entity. This question is very elementary, but it is obviously a central one. (227)

There is only one sufficient answer: the guiding of the supplementation must proceed from the artwork itself, and it must be strict and certain – at least when the artist can count on the viewer’s possessing a corresponding maturity and a high moral and cultural level.

That a work guides the viewer at all is not obvious. Think of how we depend in life otherwise on such supplementation, specifically in what we “sympathetically experience” of the destiny of other men. In reality we experience only very little of such things directly, and we must continually make up a picture of events, basically out of what we experience, hear, and dimly suspect. And how often do we in this way draw ourselves a false picture? Why, that is more frequent than not!

We must remember when it is a question of the guidance of the process of supplementation in our reception of the work of art that what we most lack in life, the drawing of attention to what is essential, is present with amazing force in the work of art. And if we were to ask further what it consists in, we could find, no doubt, that it is not possible to pronounce the last and truest word about it; only so much as this is easily apparent: omissions of detail that have been correctly distributed draw us on to other things. This is the affirmative contrary of the apparent modus deficiens.

But it is not that alone. Recall how the poet places certain happenings (or also simply intentions, unresolved sentiments, ressentiments, etc.) precisely in the center of interest by holding them for a long time in the shadow, and by that means compels the imagination of the reader or spectator to occupy himself with them, to puzzle over them, to figure them out.

Do not think that this is a mere artist’s trick, a means of creating tension. It is rather a drawing-out of the imagination as it supplements what it sees, arousing it to great tension and autonomous action – not to mention making the spectator a confederate of the writer as he poetizes and creates. In fact, the poet in this way imitates life. For our own experience shows us human conflicts – always half in shadow, half capable of being guessed – drawn apart and thrown together with thousands of things that divert one’s attention. The writer shows us the same tokens, but concentrated and cleansed of all disturbances, and with that, he draws out the imagination that it may supplement what is seen in a well-directed and clear manner.

The entire situation is clearly integrated into the succession of strata in a specific way. We may ask, therefore, how it is integrated, and which strata are peculiar to it.

The answer cannot be given uniformly, for the arts – even if one considers only the representational ones – are not the same with respect to each other. The levels upon which selection, omission, concentration, etc. take place is purely sensible in the plastic arts, but in literature it takes place on the level of representation, specifically the representation that is guided by words. (228)

It is closer in one respect to matter, in another to the “material”; in the first it belongs rather in the external shaping of matter (color, light, shadow, in the case of painting) and in the second more in the inner shaping of the material (the series of scenes in drama). Yet something their meanings have in common can be discerned that probably is also true mutatis mutandis for the non-representational arts: selection takes place in the middle strata of the work of art, and it belongs therefore neither to the real-sensible foreground nor to the most inner parts of the background, but rather is found in the outer strata of the latter.

This fact can be seen immediately in the case of poetry, where the “material” is limited, curtailed, and condensed by this procedure; here the selection occurs in the stratum in which the scenes are given form, and on the next stratum, in which the material has already been brought to a state of greater unity regarding the story and the destiny of its characters. These are precisely the strata where concreteness, vivacity, closeness to life, and clarity are most at stake.

But this is also true of the middle strata (the outer strata of the background) in painting. For there the background already begins with the spatiality and physicality that appear on the canvas; it is here – even more with respect to the “light in the painting” – that the choices be made and the shaping of the objective elements, as the painter sees them, take place.

Especially important about these reflections is this: the point is reached where the analysis of the strata becomes attached to the analysis of form. For it might appear at first sight as though the two stood obliquely to each other. That is clearly not so, and it is not by chance that in our very first steps we insisted upon the importance of the middle strata.

It is simply no longer possible, when one has grasped the principle behind the order of strata, to go a step further without encountering form and strata repeatedly.

Chapter 17: The Hierarchical Bestowing of Form in the Arts

a) The peculiar character of bestowing form in art

These observations are nothing more than a prelude. The main question that now appears asks: what, indeed, is bestowal of form in aesthetics, what kind of thing is it – in contrast to other kinds of shaping, to the ontic kind, for example, or to the subjective shaping of our ideas; and, perhaps most in contrast to the active shaping of things by practical human activities, such as the shaping of the conditions of life?

If one takes off from the representational arts, the first thing one will encounter is that here we have to do with a transforming: the material that art takes in is not simply reproduced but transformed into something else. That is the reason (229) why all theories of imitation are wrong, even though the earliest beginnings of the arts may have consisted in the imitation of some given thing.

The previous chapter developed a conception of the way “transformation” is to be understood. There we found the elements of selection, omission, and the guidance of all acts of supplementation through the work of art itself. But it is apparently not the transformation alone that takes place. Rather there stands another transformation behind it, one that is more fundamental and that already plays a determining role in the process of selection.

For this change of structure, the following points are characteristic, which in part may be derived from the previous analysis, but in fact also leads us beyond it.

First there is a change in structure of the human psychic elements into the non-psychic and non-human: into the matter of art (words, colors, stone); or, where there is no question of a psychic element, as in certain themes in painting and sculpture, at least something alive is given shaped in lifeless matter.

This kind of transformation is identical with objectivation as such. Just it alone is tied to the reshaping of content, and this is so only because not every kind of shaping is possible in every material form.

One forgets that point quite often – namely that even this kind of transformation takes place – because of the malleability of “representation.” But it is obvious in itself that the “head of stone” is something different as that of the living human being who was perhaps the model. And no one would make such a mistake. Similarly, the person represented in literature is something different from a living man. The “transformation” begins with such simple things.

Secondly, this is a transformation into something unreal. It may appear that this contradicts the first point; for precisely “matter,” in to which the subject is transformed, is entirely real. How then can a transformation in material be at the same time a transformation into something unreal?

This can be explained in the following way. The shaping of something in material substance is not a realization, a making real, but only its representation, and this does not negate its otherness at all. The figures that the poet creates are not made real by him, any more than the things that the painter shows us: they all remain unreal, and make no pretense to reality.

It would be much better to speak in such cases of removing reality, specifically in the twofold sense: 1. The releasing [of a thing] into a new sphere and at the same time setting [it] apart from reality; 2. Alteration or leaving aside many details, without which what is real could not be. But what is represented must be carried by some kind of matter; otherwise it would remain tied to a subjective picture, and could not enter the sphere of objectivation [Objektivation]. But of course, it is with this latter that aesthetic objectivity [Gegenstänlichkeit] begins. (230)

We can perhaps express this idea in summary form: with the realization of form – one that has already been selected – in matter, the material loses its reality. Or, while form becomes real in matter, the thing represented becomes by that process relieved of its reality and is placed over against it.

The third element is that this is a transformation resulting in greater intuitive clarity. This element is not equivalent either to the first or to the second. Matter is no doubt available to clear intuition, but only in the sense of the first kind of seeing, i.e., perception, and in that case it no longer is involved in the bestowing of form upon the “material” – or, if so, only as a means. The realm of the unreal, however, is in general not at all clearly intuitable; a special sort of formal construction is required for that.

For art works of all kinds it is precisely this aspect of bestowing form that is of special importance. For in most cases “material” is not inherently clear: we have in life no doubt intuitive knowledge of mental and organic things – the latter are deeply concealed – but only incomplete knowledge, and even that knowledge is in part like a dark sense of something without concrete intuitable content.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, yes, even the musician, each lifts these objects out of their shadowy vagueness and makes them “indirectly” visible, audible, imaginable; they let them appear in the shape of concrete scenes or in the inward stance of a portrait, or in the waxing and waning of volumes of sound.

The decisive element herein is holding strictly fast to the unreality, or, perhaps even more, to a tangible deprivation of the sense of realty. This last phenomenon does not conflict with a thing’s clear intuitibility. It manifests in this case the fact that the close connection of reality to clarity that we normally assume in life does not retain its validity in the realm of art. There is a clear intuitibility of a higher order, such as only art can produce to such a degree. Objectively it is identical with the “second seeing” or “beholding” that attaches itself to perception, but there it enters into immediate opposition to it, and has the advantage of inner freedom of beholding what is not real.

If we take these two points together, viz., the transformation into unreality and this into clear intuitable presence, then one is still inclined involuntarily to seek something positive that could genuinely connect them. Such things cannot be adequately grasped; yet anyone at all who asks this question has seen this phenomenon, and most have characterized it as “idea.”

This notion, no doubt, has often been understood too simply in a Platonic manner as a certain purity or perfection; but then again, the universality of the “idea” is usually not absent. However in this last case we see the confusion, for then we would lose the element of clear intuitibility. (231)

One must rather take one’s point of departure from the ontic nature of ideal being, as is familiar from mathematical or axiological structures: they are indifferent to reality and unreality, but they open us to greater possibilities than the real.

Structures as those that arise in the strata of the background do not have such ideal being; for example, literary characters, for otherwise they would be capable of being grasped by anyone independently of the work. This is obviously not the case. They also do not really possess eternal timeless being, but are very much dependent on their historical fate (the preservation of the text and the availability of minds adequate to them).

True, these figures “appear” in a timeless reality and are raised into an ideal realm. And that is quite obvious, for they possess nothing at all but the form of being we call appearance – with all conditions that belong to it (one should recall here the “tripartite” and four-part relation, Chap. 5b). To be perfectly accurate, we should say that structures of this kind have of course been raised to the ideal dimension, but only in an appearing ideality. And that is just sufficient for the figures of literature and portraiture, etc.68

For this appearing ideality unites the elevation above time and above connectedness to reality and the most concrete intuitive clarity. And this is what is at stake in this region. As such, we see something of what is genuinely correct about Platonic intuitionism: no doubt, it occurs in a very different type of beholding, as, for example, was the idea of Schelling and Schopenhauer.

b) The hierarchy of form-bestowal by strata

The previous points demonstrate clearly how closely related is the problem of the bestowal of form in the work of art to that of the succession of strata upon which it is built. The “appearing ideality,” which comprises the first four elements of “transformation,” is a function of the appearance-relation, as it governs from stratum to stratum – as far, at least, as the stratification reaches in the aesthetic object.

It is now necessary to evaluate this “function” with reference to the problem of the bestowal of form. If the possibility existed of analyzing “structurally” the entire phenomenon of aesthetical form purely as such, we could take a direct route here, in such a way, for example, as biology describes and analyzes organic forms or as ontology does for formal structural organization. But this possibility is not given: it would as such be equivalent to the revelation of the mystery of artistic production. This revelation is prohibited to philosophical inquiry.

What remains is the description of the conditions prevailing between the strata of the aesthetic object with respect to the bestowing of form. The following theses are most decisive. (232)

1. Every stratum of the aesthetic object has its own kind of formation, one that does not merge with any other stratum.
2. But there is also contained a dependency in this independence: the formation of the “prior” stratum must always be sufficient to allow the appearance of the next inner stratum.
3. In the total effect, then, the most external formation, i.e., the sensibly given one, is in the end determined by what is most different from it – by the element lying deepest in the background; it is the task of the more external formation to allow the most internal to appear.

An entire program of research is of course contained in these three theses, that, to do them justice, would have to be carried out with all the arts. Here a few remarks will clarify the matter and leave the issue open to supplementation later on.

The first thesis concerns the specific formation of every stratum. In poetry the bestowal of form upon language (thus upon the “matter”) is obviously different from the formation of what is spoken by it; and this is so, no doubt, even when one takes the latter simply as that which “appears first of all” (that is, as the most external outer stratum of the background), thus as what directly manifests only the movement, gesture, and speech of the literary characters.

And yet the formation of the “manifested” movement, gestures, and speech (reproduced in the theatrical presentation) is different from the bestowal of form upon situations and actions. As the author can choose his words in very different ways in order to present the same movements and gestures, so also can he select the elements of movement and gesture – or even the dialogue – of his characters very differently in order to reveal indirectly to intuition the inward sense of the specific relationships among men, of the situations and actions. Compare with each other the ways different storytellers place before our eyes relatively similar situations in life. The independence of the forms in each of these strata will quickly become apparent.

This relation can be pursued: when there appears behind the level of situation and plot a level of the mental character of individuals or of an entire social milieu, there must also appear on this level some elements of form of a different kind – in fact both in the selection and the guiding of ideas. The poet cannot analyze a character with all his tricks and guises prior to his appearance; he can only let him show himself just as the external events in life show him to be from time to time: by highlighting his individual traits, illuminating his typical mannerisms and his social status. But the poet has the freedom to select the social status and mannerisms that are appropriate to his purpose in this “showing.” In this way, he preserves the concrete clear intuitibility even in what cannot be given directly to everyday vision.

And so it stands also with the further stratum of the entire human lot, which the poet can in fact give us only in small segments; here too (233) form is bestowed upon a larger whole out of certain individual parts – but in such a way that the parts interlock within the whole of the poet’s vision.

This is only an example. For in other arts the order of strata takes a different form than in literature. Moreover, the order of strata in literature has not been exhausted by the analysis thus far; there still are the last inner strata to consider. But it is nevertheless easy to see that a similar account applies there also, as, e.g., for the idea of personality, and not less for the universally human.

We can easily compare this with the situation in painting. The “technique” of painting (the treatment of color, the brushwork, etc.) is a perfect example of form-bestowal, but in a direct sense only upon the real foreground. The organization of three-dimensional space, the “light in the painting” and the physical objects are genuine form-bestowals, but obviously ones of a different kind, which, in comparison to the former, can be freely varied. Again, the representation of motion produces form of a third kind; and behind this stratum stand the further strata in clear intuitibility: that of the plot, of psychological states, moods, attitudes, or that of a character’s individual personality, etc. – they are all, in the same picture, formal structures of an individual kind, transformations of something seen, or of ideal entities beheld in the mind –; but there are just as many different formal structures that never flow over and into each other, because each one has its own meaning, incorporating selection, condensing, and the power to draw attention to itself upon its own, and only on its own level, having nothing to seek on another level. For example, one cannot give form to spatial depth or lighting conditions on the same level as the one in which psychological states and attitudes are represented; or to give shape to the ideal of personality that is visible in a portrait where the concern is with movement and animation. Each must have its peculiar form bestowed upon it within its stratum.

In non-representational art, the situation is also at bottom no different – at least provided that stratifications govern in them. We can see this clearly in music; there, especially, the outer and inner strata are widely separated: each move entirely within the hierarchically arranged unities of the compositional structure, each unity entirely in the psychic world of feeling and moods.

Just this heterogeneity – which creates the miracle of music – is sufficient to make unequivocally clear the absolute otherness of bestowing forms upon sound and on the psychological realities that appear there. We recall how in the Lied the same human psychic themes can be set to music in quite different ways, without our being able to say that only one musical setting is “right” for the text. And, on the other hand, we recall how one can interpret, under certain circumstances, works of “pure” music very differently with respect to its spirit. And even where this plurality of meaning has its limits in what are purely matters of feeling, the formal structure of the music is quite different from the psychological content and its specific form. (234)

We can see the same conditions within the outer strata. A movement’s “structure,” for example, is not determined in the slightest by the “musical theme” (the smallest unity). This is true also the other way around. The theme has to be correctly chosen if it is to build a certain kind of movement (e.g., a finale written to a specific tempo), but it is never the case that only a single appropriate motif can be found for it. In certain circumstances (to make the point sharper), it is possible even to write the same “movement” around another theme. This conflicts only with the cant of musical theory, which does not distinguish sharply in this context between theme and structure, and therefore calls a movement written to another motif a limine a “different movement.”

What this all makes clear, besides the implications we have already drawn, is this: the main weight of this independence, with regards to form, of the strata of an object is felt in the middle strata: in the case of the real foreground this is almost self-evident, for perception has independent laws for all areas of the senses, and these must be satisfied if there is to be an aesthetical effect. For the last strata of the background, however, the independence of the process of bestowing form is no longer as important: the ideal aspects tower up from their narrow confines – even the purely aesthetical ones – and usually enter into the realm of the moral.

Neither the foreground nor the final and deepest storehouse of ideal content is for itself an aesthetical structure. In all respects, the crucial phase lies in the middle strata: in the deeper outer strata and the less deep inner strata. The concrete riches and the intuitive clarity are played out there, and in them, therefore, lies the greatest variety in the way form may be bestowed.

Here one should always keep in mind that the enormous riches of content of works of literature, painting, music, and the like, rest precisely upon these strata and primarily upon the fact that the forms lie thickly arranged one upon the other. This has its great charm, moreover, in the independence of each of these superimposed formations as they rest upon each other.

The “heart” that is once raised to the level of this inner – higher – beholding is initially overwhelmed by the multiplicity of forms. The heart peers through one and immediately comes upon another one standing behind it. It finds no peace, and is drawn from one act of beholding to another.

c) Connections in the giving of form within the strata

The second point above maintained that independence always contains some form of dependency, such that the forms given in a prior stratum are sufficient for the appearance of the next one further down. Now what kind of dependency is this? And how is it compatible with the independence of form in each stratum?

We may first answer: it is the same dependence that we recognized in the relation of appearance generally. Every (235) stratum is thus so constituted as to allow the deeper stratum to appear. What is new about the relation of appearance is only that it is now a question of a relationship among the formal structures.

But then how is this a relationship among formal structures? Up to now, it has always appeared that relations of form and of appearance were opposed to each other. Yet we may earnestly ask whether next to the kind of beauty that consists in appearance there is not still another kind that is entirely assimilated to a pure play with form. And, at least with respect to ornamentation, that could not be disputed. How does that fact cohere with the dependency of formal structure within the sequence of strata in the work of art?

It is obviously false to separate widely the phenomena of form-bestowal and appearance. In fact, they are closely related. To begin with, the difference between them is only of a methodological sort: we cannot really “analyze” aesthetical form in any of its strata, for that is and remains the secret of art; it can be characterized only as to certain of its external traits. But we can of course analyze the relation of appearance. For that reason, we placed its discussion early on, and treated it independently, as though there was no relation to form. This methodological opposition cannot, however, be taken as absolute, or as founded in the very nature of the phenomena.

Most importantly, we must once again warn ourselves before proceeding not to confuse the opposition in question with that between “form” and “content.” The latter is in part merely apparent: “form and material” can be clearly distinguished, but unformed material is not the “content” of the work of art – in fact, not in any of its strata – but only that which has been given form. For that reason, there is little that can be done with that distinction here. It is still true that the “content” – if one insists on using the term – always essentially consists in form.

The evidence for the relation of form concealed in the relation of appearance can be, however, derived only descriptively from the construction of the artwork’s strata. For this, we must again appeal to a selection of phenomena, which, to be sure, cannot be complete, but seeks only to approach the distinction where it is relatively attainable, thus one that is relatively arbitrary.

Let us begin with sculpture, where the bestowing of form upon matter in the foreground takes place in real space. How does the sculptor allow movement and life to appear, while his figures are at rest and thus lifeless? In this question, there is also a concern for the relations of the real sensible stratum to the two that follow it, the outer strata of the background. For movement is not yet life, and life “appears” only in movement as something distinct – which, no doubt, may also be absent if the skill of the artist fails him.

We cannot, as we have noted, identify the very nature of how the sculptor does it. But this much is visible. He brings life about by mans of bestowing form upon the foreground (that is, the real matter, clay, or (236) stone) in a peculiar way. There is no other way to let movement appear, or, a fortiori, animation.

The sculptor “gives form,” to be sure, directly to the momentary position of the limbs in that phase of their motion that he has chosen, for example, that of the wrestlers at a single moment of their match; but he chooses the phase such that the movement indirectly expresses itself, that is, he gives form to the phase of the motion of the struggle that he wishes to show us by shaping the phase statically. And to achieve this, he must make visible in that phase everything that is characteristic of that phase of motion (position, the play of muscles).

The situation is the same in the relation to the next stratum: animation. Life is no longer something spatial, in the proper sense, while movement of course still is. But life expresses itself in movement; therefore, one may also express life in movement by art. The sculptor does that by showing us the tension and effort of the entire body as it goes about its work. He can hammer out these two by giving spatial form to the phase of motion.

The element of bestowing form upon the foreground, which produces this miracle, is extraordinarily subtle. It may lie in the smallest measures among the spatial relations. Our analysis cannot penetrate these subtleties of form; it may only appear to the living aesthetical beholding on the part of the viewer. One may stand before the Wrestlers and ask which details in the group allow tension, struggle, and life itself, to appear. One will be able to find and specify many things, but one will not exhaust the riches of form, as long as it lets other elements of form appear (movement and life). One senses here with greater assurance how the appearing form is tied to the visible form, and how the work of art consists precisely in the fact that the latter is sufficient for the former.

And how does the composer succeed, when he wishes to express “passion,” or a “solemn silence,” “hidden sorrow,” “yearning,” “awe-inspiring greatness,” and the like? Remember that none of these examples is taken from program music; they concern the psychic content, i.e., the inner strata of pure music.

There is no doubt: the composer, too, is simply free to give form to the outer strata of music such that they allow the given psychic forms to appear. There is no other way for the musical expression of human inwardness.

But now the outer strata of music are those that allow of no psychic [seelische] themes, but rather move in pure tonal musical formations and have their own “themes” in them. How, then, can the musician make psychic forms appear in the formal design of a musical structure?

The answer was given above (Chap. 14c), but without consideration of the problem of form, in the following way: music is fundamentally related to the life of the soul; both are extended in time, both exist in a flow, in constant transitions, in the motion; (237) both are found in the reciprocal play of tension and relaxation, of excitement and calm.

That constitutes the opposition of the life of the soul to the external physical world just as much as the opposition of music to the plastic arts. And therefore music, with its flow, its transitions, its agitation, can map at such great proximity and with such distinctness the flow, transitions, and agitation of our psychic life (the surging, the rising and falling, the dying away, the roaring and rushing, pursuit and escape … and the taming of these unchained forces …).

These elements are contained in musical form itself, they co-constitute it and are heard as such from within it. More accurately, they are contained in all three outer strata of the musical background – from the musical “theme” to the “movement” and to the sonata. It follows from this that they do not need to be added to the design of the structure, but that rather the purely musical-compositional design is what allows the psychic design (excitement and the like) to appear.

One can follow this relation further into very fine details – for example, into the succession of the motifs, the sonic effects of modulation, the unexpected appearance of new “development” or even a mere pianissimo. … One may also follow it from within the outer strata from stratum to stratum, and similarly from the deeper outer strata to the deeper inner strata, and so forth.

But with that, nothing else new has been said. What is alone important is just the indicated foundational relation itself. And it is clear proof of the dependent status of form in the series of strata; proof, that is, for that hierarchy of the levels of formation, each one independent in itself, by means of which the deeper formation, in regard to its appearance, is tied to the formation directly before it.

As a third area of study let us now take literature. It shares with music the temporality of the main dimension in which it operates. In it are also the movement and the flow of the psychic life, which give the middle strata their wealth of content. But the similarity is merely apparent.

We see this immediately when we pass from the appearance-relation to the form-relation. Music can directly “paint,” as it were, the movement of the soul by tonal agitation and stress; literature cannot do that, or it can only in a very limited way, by the sound of words. Literature must rather make the same detour here that our knowledge of our psychic life does: it passes from movement and gesture to situation and plot, and from there to the character and inward moral life of persons, and again from there to large collections of events, that is, to the whole of human life and destiny.

To what extent may one say that in this case we are dealing with relationships of a formal sort? Or, to restrict the question, how does the poet bring it to pass (238) that such inward things like situations and events in the plot appear in the movements and gestures that are presented spatially and external to them?

He proceeds no differently than in life itself. He bestows form upon what is external and visible, and lets it so appear by means of words, as we would see it in life as eye-witnesses; but through this bestowal of form on what is external –with all the writer’s means of selection and guidance – he allows at the same time the internal to be reflected in the external, and the idea in it to “appear.” For gesture and movement are revealing, and always tell us indirectly something about the human soul, something, most likely, they were supposed precisely to keep silent about and to conceal.

Thus the poet indirectly gives form to inward matters by bestowing form upon external things: upon the situation, provided that it is touched with psychic tension, and the plot, with its uncertainties, its struggles, and its climactic decisions.

The process of giving form proceeds correspondingly in the series of strata: within the plot, the poet gives form to the character and morals of his figures; and within the last stratum and all the earlier ones together, he draws the shape of an entire human destiny.

d) Determining form from within

If we keep these ideas before our mind, it becomes clear why the attempts of aesthetics to solve the puzzle of beauty with a uniform analysis of form are condemned to failure. One thought of the form of a work of art as something uniformly comprehensible. However, it is not. Form is hierarchical in nature, and yet upon every level it is independent, although containing at the same time a certain dependency. No one had imagined such complicated conditions to exist within it. Nonetheless, the element of dependency has still not been exhausted.

The third point set forth above claimed that in the total effect the most external element of form is already determined by what is most heterogeneous to it, that is, by the one furthest in the background. That seems, at first sight, however, to conflict with the previous point. That claimed that the bestowal of form upon the anterior stratum always must allow the appearance of the one next deep, in which case the appearance of the posterior would be dependent upon the anterior. But if so, then in the final effect of the entire series of strata the most external forms could not be dependent on the most internal ones, but rather the internal ones are dependent on the external ones.

This aporia rests upon a confusion. It can be resolved in a manner similar to the resolution of the theoretical confusions of ratio cognoscendi and ratio essendi: in the appearance-relation the form given upon the anterior stratum is always conditional for the appearance of the posterior one; in contrast, in the conditions of composition of the work of art, and in the conditions of the work of the artist producing it, the situation is the other way around. The giving of form on the posterior stratum is conditional upon that of the anterior. For what is in the foreground is formed in just such a manner that it permits the form given to the background to appear. The deeper inner strata therefore determine it. They are the ones for whose sake the (239) outer strata are there. And in this sense even the bestowal of form upon the sensible foreground is, in the end, determined precisely by means of the last background stratum.

This is a relationship among conditions that takes on very important forms in many of the arts, and it is also a very concrete one, such that one immediately senses from where the principle of selection in the middle strata has been taken, namely from the last background stratum, from a universal idea, perhaps, that is intended to appear concretely in the work.

In literature we find famous examples of this type, even when they do not quite make their point strongly felt at all: the determination of small external details by means of the “idea” of the things. For example, Schiller’s Luise Millerin. Idea: the struggle of the oppressed for freedom from the despotism of the nobles. This idea runs through the characters and their destinies, which have been selected for its sake; it penetrates into situations and behavior, and further into speech, movement, and gestures – and from there as far as the written text of the play. Such interplay is perhaps even clearer in lyric poetry, where the forms of words directly express moods: for example, [Goethe’s] “Über allen Gipfeln.” The sense of impending death resonates with a certain directness from the verses.

Such self-interlinking of the first with the last link in the chain of artistic form may be felt everywhere in successful work, if one is attentive to it.

In the case of painting, it may be especially noticeable in portraiture, at least where real skill applies itself to something genuinely individual. The skill consists essentially in grasping and making visible this individuality. In great masters, it extends beyond empirical individuality – to the “individual idea.”

How does the painter express such a thing? In no other way than in the way life occasionally expresses such things and “betrays” them: through small features of what is visible – a shadow at the corner of a mouth, a pair of light spots in the eyes – there is no other way. But this is in reality the passageway over the entire linkage of strata in painting, a passageway that cannot be shortened. For every omission of strata in the continuous process of the bestowal of form threatens the entire work with a lack of uniformity and comprehensibility. A portrait can have a harmonious effect only if it contains within itself the unbroken succession of the formal elements.

One can take examples from anywhere at all – always assuming that the final inner strata are present. In music, for example, it is almost entirely obvious that the ideal is directly determinative of the tonal elements, which are its building-blocks. Thus, the festiveness of [Beethoven’s] Ninth Symphony is apparent, and that mood can be followed into its themes; these are determined by the fundamental mood in which its idea is rooted: broad, full-hearted love of humanity. The same can be said of the youthful, (240) untroubled heroism in [Richard Wagner’s] “Forging Song” in Siegfried. And how much more must this be true of Bach’s late fugues (The Art of the Fugue and the Ricercar), of which everyone senses the metaphysical horizons! No one can say just what these elements consist in. But it is determinative of the pieces up to the purely sonic foreground. And only the people who hear them from within are able to hear these works rightly.

In these reflections, we have omitted reference to architecture. It is more difficult to demonstrate these points in its case. But the last point is clear: provided that universal ideas are present at all at the roots of a work of architecture, so much is valid: they co-determine, with special purity and directness, the external shape of the work. We see this everywhere in monuments; in churches, the reaching of the spires to the heights corresponds to no practical ends. But even in the structure of a house, there is a synthesis of the feeling of home with family pride. All of that is visible in the external form.

Chapter 18: Appearance and Form

a) The dependence and independence of form

The most striking thing about the inquiries in the last chapter was that independence and dependency in the process of bestowing form accompanied each other through all strata. This interpenetration is nothing new in itself; we know it also from another system of strata, i.e., the categorical stratification in the structure of the real world.

What is of positive value here is that a mutual relation of supplementation and support passes through all strata, and, indeed a relation of forms – although, notably, each form is different in kind in the various strata.

What is here of primary importance is that the giving of form on a single stratum, seen as isolated and taken in itself, is not at all aesthetical form. The aesthetics of form has always misunderstood that. It thought to take to itself a definite kind of formal element, i.e., that of some one stratum, for example, the stratum in which literary material is treated, and to investigate just as such its intrinsic “laws.” That may be possible, but it fails to achieve its purpose, for in this way one does not arrive at aesthetical form at all. For that begins only with the succession of forms of different kinds.

Here it is a question precisely of the mutuality of supplementation and support of forms, a kind of reciprocal conditionality that yet allows a relative independence of the formal elements of individual strata. For that reason a content peculiar to each stratum appears to careful observation: in the middle strata of literature, for example, we see the colorful multiplicity of events, of situations, or perhaps also of a whole scene – each according to the given level –and, within certain limits, one can enjoy each “content” of such kinds and let it have its peculiar effect. And, one may add (241) here that the more content a work of art has in the middle strata, the richer and more accomplished it is. This content is entirely formal in nature.

We see from this how things stand with regard to the interpenetration of independence and dependency within the strata. It is quite noteworthy that the rear strata shine through the ones more to the front, and it is just in that fact that the aesthetical meaning of the bestowal of form for the latter consists: in the task of allowing them to shine through. Nonetheless it is for that very reason not true that the meaning of the forward strata is entirely exhausted in that task.

To the contrary, every stratum, along with the artistic shaping that it has undergone, has its own weight, and this weight will be felt by the understanding viewer as possessing its own content – “content” of course not as opposed to form, but rather in the above sense of content [Gehalt], for which the formal element is the chief thing.

One can identify this phenomenon quite precisely. Let us return to the middle strata of literature. The verse, “Wie er sich räuspert, wie er spuckt,”69 is essential here; similarly the way a man quickly looks about himself for possible witnesses, before he opens a shut door, or glances upon a piece of writing that is not intended for him. This is the stratum of movement and gesture. The same is true of the next stratum, that of situation and plot: think of the way a person caught in a lie tries to extract himself – he may go about it very thoughtfully and even succeed in it, but he may also get himself caught in contradictions and stand there ashamed. In both cases, apart from all transparency of the traits of moral character – thus for the next stratum – the bestowal of plastic form upon this variety of material has a value in itself that is also felt as such: specifically, as colorful, rich, abundant, human, and as true to life.

It is not possible to demonstrate these matters except by reference to examples like these and by appealing to the aesthetical enjoyment of this concrete richness. It is at least conceivable that a great deal of detail not be necessary for the appearance of character and destiny. Yet such richness of detail would still be justified, for it has a weight of its own: it gives a breadth and resonance to the work that is not unimportant.

Only in this way may we properly approach the relation, which still hangs in suspense, between independence and dependency in the hierarchy of aesthetical form that exists in the strata of the artwork. In fact, precisely in respect to aesthetics the thorough bestowing of form upon details in every stratum is done on the one hand entirely for the sake of some other detail, but on the other hand, it is there entirely for itself alone.

It is not excessive to express the matter so sharply, because on both sides of this apparent autonomy there is a separate aesthetic value. The details of the form given each stratum – especially in the middle strata – (242) create the riches, but the relation of appearance creates the depth and uniformity of the work of art.

But the unity of the whole will seem “thin” despite all depth, if it lacks the completeness of form bestowed on a variety of details in the middle strata; and similarly the riches of a colorful abundance of content will seem flat, if the full growth of detail does not allow its other face to be shown, that of transparency.

We can illustrate these matters with other arts. They are expressed with special clarity, for example, in painting; we saw already that here the greatest weight lies more heavily than elsewhere upon the purely sensible and visible, that is, upon the outer strata.

Why is that so? Hegel’s aesthetics was anxious to respond: because painting is a sensuous-superficial art, and does not aim at the inwardness of things, as literature does. We have already noted the distortions of this thought: it is true neither that the painterly arts lack inner strata, nor that its attachment to what is visible is mere superficiality. To the contrary, it fulfills with the greatest exactitude the task of art to let everything – even what is of the nature of ideas – to appear in sensible form; just that is called “aesthetical.”

Naturally, therefore, the emphasis in aesthetics also lies entirely upon the sensible element, by which we mean: upon the outer strata. Therefore, too, it is obvious that all details that fall under the light internal to the painting have a weight of their own. Just by themselves alone, they tell us something about this apparent light that we might not have noticed in life – and, they do that, indeed, apart from what features of life and motion ought to “appear” just through this light. For it is a question here too of the riches and abundance of what is visible, of their value for themselves alone – thus a richness lying quite beyond the limits of what is a necessary condition of this appearance. Despite all the variety of the circumstances, this is at bottom the same relation as in literature. What is new here is only that on both sides – that of independence and that of dependency –the character of the form on each stratum emerges more clearly.

It is no different in the non-representational arts, although here the independence of the formal elements in individual strata is more strongly apparent. True, this is not valid at all for the external strata, but that much more valid for the transition to the inner strata.

This is clear in music. The outer strata include the compositional elements, and these unfold their richness of form on each single stratum with convincing independence: it is a pure play with form, and is felt as such. The unfolding of the “themes,” their variation, development, extension and recapitulation, their combination with other themes, submersion in them and then their return – those are all things that have their meaning and their laws entirely within themselves, and these latter do not draw upon whatever psychic content that appears in them. (243)

This does not of course prevent such psychic content from still appearing in just this hierarchical bestowal of form upon the compositional elements. The one is wonderfully compatible with the other; the dependency does not encroach upon the independence. A model of this relation is, again, contrapuntal music: its riches of form can be valued and enjoyed in themselves; it can also offer us a psychic background of amazing profundity.

b) Pure play with form

One thing becomes clear from the example of music: There must exist a kind of pure formal beauty that does not rest upon the appearance-relation. Otherwise, such a pure independent play with form, as we find in music would not be possible. More precisely, it might be possible, but it could not have such an unambiguous claim to an independent aesthetical effect.

We begin this section with this claim; it does not limit itself to music. We encounter it again in architecture, and it reaches its highest point in ornamental art, for there the play with form appears just for itself alone, without any relation of strata or transparency. But at this point, the problem of form becomes again more complex.

One thing must be clear before we proceed: if there is beauty in a pure play with form – without stratification, etc. – it is improbable that it be quite absent anywhere. We would thus be forced to seek out once again its laws, even in the representational arts. Of course then we might be dealing with a great variety of graduations in the phenomenon, and these could very well explain a disappearance behind the texture of stratification and of relations of appearance.

First, we direct the question at the non-representational arts. In their case, the appearance-relation is less central from the very outset. And, no doubt, the question concerns for the most part ornamental art, although this art does not stand on the same level as the other arts, and even with respect to the pure play of form it reaches the value of music or architecture only in a limited way.

We have already shown (Chap. 7e) how the play with form achieves in ornamental art a certain independence, which, however, comes about only in a limited way through the inclusion of the ornament in a greater formal context, for example, that of an architectural work. The remainder of the appearance-relation, which nonetheless might be attached to it, should be left out of consideration here.

It remains to be seen how something similar to what occurs in the external strata of music can be found in ornament. A formal motif, a “theme” as it were, is placed at the foundation and then is freely and imaginatively transformed, repeated, interrelated, placed in opposition, and in these transformations laced together to form a new and greater whole.

This schema applies fairly well to ornament. Of course the process need not be so simple; there can be an interrelation of motifs of different (244) kinds. They can also be varied together or independently of each other; in this way they can lead to greater multiplicity. In that case, the mastery of the whole by means of an inclusive formal unity will mark a greater achievement and a higher synthesis.

This play with form can be carried out on a variety of grades: it can be very primitive – both in the motifs and in the treatment of them – it can also rise to considerable complexity and then offer to our eyes the task of tracing its lines or its chains of repetitions, of puzzling out the twisting play, of finding the unity of the whole, which cannot be taken in a clear view immediately, but which is still within reach, or of tying together its various entries, etc.

The pleasure given the viewing subject when he is drawn into such “tasks” is clearly of a unique kind, although less profound than in the other arts. In any case, there is a stimulus here and excitement sui generis. One thinks involuntarily of the “play of the powers of the mind” that Kant recommended so highly, which begins its work through the perception of relations of line and form of this kind. In fact, much can be inspired by a complicated ornamental art: contrast, harmony, Arabesques, the intertwining and unraveling (of lines, for example), overlapping, the interruption and the continuation of what was interrupted.

Those are elements that we also know from the middle strata of music, and there, too, we have a distinct autonomy, a case of speaking-for-itself – without referring beyond itself to something else. And if such independence is possible in music, where, indeed, the appearance-relation is dependent upon it, how much more must it be possible in ornamental art, where this relation is absent.

No doubt, formal beauty of this kind is more various and sublime in music. Why is this so? The basis for it must lie, in the end, neither in the greater workability of the audible “matter” (tones and sounds), nor in the greater variety of its possibilities – in both respects the “visible matter” is at least similar – but rather because a tone does not express any physical object, and thus is free from motifs of a different kind, while the visible form falls captive to physical themes when it branches off or becomes complicated. (Or we should say: the height of a tone has nothing visible analogous to it, as color corresponds to timbre. Does music thus have an additional dimension?)

Thus it occurs that ornamental art has to worry about shielding itself from concretization. Concretization inhibits free play with form – although, on occasion, it may also give such free play new ideas. But such stimulus should lie in the background; it must not become intrusive. For this reason in all ornamental art that makes use of plant or animal motifs, there is a clear tendency towards stylization. That term means in this context approximately the same as de-concretization: the natural form (245) becomes conscious, and is expressly transformed into something else. This other thing is the image, which fits itself into the play of lines, the patterns, or the twisting shapes upon which it is visible.

We see this phenomenon clearly in the leaf and tendril motifs of the ancients; similarly in dolphin, lion, snake, or fish motifs. We see it still in the demon and monster motifs of the Gothic, which no doubt stand already at the limits of sculpture and ornament.

This entire tendency, which represents a kind of flight from formal realism, is only a variation of what we have already encountered in a more general form as an element in making an object less real. But here it is not a question of a mode of being, but of form itself. These objects should no longer affect us as a real animal or a real plant, but as something entirely different, something that does not appear in the real world in such a manner, for example, as musical “themes” never occur in the real world outside of music. The multiplicity that arises out of the play with form is intended to be a world unto itself; it should never, therefore, count as the imitation of something real even of its parts. Here we can grasp the opposition between ornamental art and painting.

It makes sense, therefore, to orient the problem of the pure play with form precisely towards primitive motifs. These still stand entirely on this side of all thing, animal, or plant motifs. One can perhaps describe them most simply as motifs that are spatial combinations of sorts or even as “geometric.” The latter expression should of course not be taken in a strictly mathematical sense, but only in the sense of a geometric way of looking at form.

It has long been remarked that certain simple geometrical figures exert a definite aesthetical attraction, which can be rightly classified with aesthetical pleasure, enjoyment, etc. Often in past times this attraction was praised as the “beauty” of pure geometry. The ancient belief that the circle was the “most perfect form,” and, perhaps even more, the sphere, did not rest at all upon speculative considerations alone, but rather more on the obvious intuitive simplicity and the clarity of the figures, which themselves were originally felt as “beauty.”

We can feel that immediately even today. Perhaps the shape of the ellipse or the hyperbole seems even more “beautiful” to us; and in this a dark sense of the lawfulness that inheres in it speaks to us clearly. Further examples of this are the spiral, both the Archimedean and the logarithmic. One can follow this series further downwards – to the rhombus, the rectangle, squares, and triangle; only here the human sense of aesthetical form is not so universal. But in other areas, that is also true.

If one is sufficiently advanced in this play with form as to see into these primitive beginnings, one may draw the conclusion (246) that a single great line of gradations leads from them to the enormous riches of form in music and also to the middle strata of other arts.

One should not spoil this insight by an assumption that an inscrutable opposition exists between the beauty of appearance and the “beauty of form.” Rather, our examples from geometry show precisely that absolutely continuous transitions are present here: to this bears witness the presentment of the laws behind the figures felt by the naïve viewer, that is, a person that is not scientifically oriented. For in this presentment the remainder of the relation of appearance is clearly recognizable. One may recall here Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the intuitive character of geometrical insight.

But it is the same the other way around. Even aesthetical joy taken in the play with form never entirely ceases, even in a person trained ever so much in the representational arts. We already demonstrated that in the case of music; it is almost as clear in the middle strata of poetry and painting – specifically wherever the multiplicity of details reaches a magnitude that renders it aesthetically independent. For detail is genuine bestowal of form – and indeed one far beyond what is needed for appearance to take place.

Thus, the attachments on both sides are tangible, and the continuity of gradations in the interpenetration of these “two kinds of beauty” is entirely complete. One should not forget in this context that the principle of the one and the other nevertheless remain completely different.

c) Shallow and profound art

This scale is also one of depth. One senses before all reflection that ornamental art is a “shallow” art; and no one would ever think of placing it alongside the literary works or compositions of great masters. The continuity of the scale thus extends from the shallowest to the deepest aesthetical effect. And the problem that appears here is just this: what is the relationship of the relative depth of aesthetical effect to the relative preponderance of the appearance-relation or of the play with form?

We must first make one thing clear: anyone who thinks seriously about art is often disposed to consider only “great art” as being worthy of his consideration –indeed, as art at all. But such art can only be profound art, where one understands “profundity” without bias as that kind of art in which the inner strata dominate, especially the last, which always contains intellectual elements.

This insight may do honor to its representatives – it tells us they are very serious about art – but it is incorrect. There is also such a thing as (247) shallow art; we usually call it “light” art. We associate it with novels intended for amusement, with dance and the operetta, with funny caricatures. True, with such “light” art the danger of being derailed is greater than in the serious and profound arts. But it is wrong to draw the conclusion from this fact that it is not genuine art at all.

The situation is rather as follows: within light art, there is also good and bad craftsmanship, for example in operetta, in dance music, in novels intended to amuse. Naturally, such works, even when they are well crafted, are directed to a superficial sensibility, observation, and enjoyment: they serve to distract, to give pleasure, to amuse. But they can do these things in an artistically accomplished manner or artlessly. And only in the latter case will the connoisseur respond to them as failures – as “kitsch.” We may understand kitsch as the attempt to cause certain effects cheaply – for the most part, emotional effects, which can be justified neither by their moral structure nor by the appearance of something from within them.

Of course, it is true that it is much easier to produce shallow works than profound ones. For simply less originality is demanded of it, less genius. Yet there are works of genius in shallow music: light, but with great beauty.

The scale of shallow and profound works exists within each art with the exception of ornamental art. But it exists also in the entire domain of the arts: the profundity of poetry and music is achieved by no other art, at least not in their great works; painting and sculpture may be for their part superior to architecture with regard to depth. So it is, at least, when one surveys them all. Of course, the scale is much larger within the arts.

What does this scale consist in? What is shallow art, what is deep art? We may begin with the act of appreciation: there are superficial and profound effects – upon the human soul. The participation of the self is from one occasion to another a different one: to be gripped, to be seized by, to be deeply shaken – or simply to be touched, to be inspired. … As amusement is distinguished from joyful elevation, so are the strata of our psychic life touched on levels of varying depth.

All this is merely a sketch of what is contained in the object itself by way of stratified formal elements. For the difference lies here: in what stratum or on what strata does the enjoyment of an artwork lie?

And yet on the other hand, it is simply not so that the superiority of the deeper objective strata corresponds always to the deeper reaction to it of the human soul. That would be to conceive the matter too simply: for a novel written abstractly would then have the greatest artistic effect because of its psychological effects upon the mind. But such a novel cannot do that, because it lacks elements of clarity (248) and closeness to life; those things lie in the middle strata, to a certain extent also in the outer strata and even in the sensible foreground. The same is the case in painting: deeply meaningful mythical figures that lack sensible vivacity, animation, and the power of color and light, cannot have a strong aesthetical effect; the deeper sense of their symbols would be unclear to intuition.

What, then, is this relation in reality? Beauty in the arts is indirect in multiple ways. The eyes pass through a series of strata, of which each allows the next one to “appear,” and in every stratum it is the specific form given to the content that brings about this appearance. Beyond that, however, still another multiplicity playfully gathers up all that comprises the riches of the artwork. This is all a recapitulation of what was said above. But it contains the basis for an answer to the question we posed. For the greater beauty is the deeper one.

But that beauty is the deeper where the eyes pass through a longer series of strata. It does not matter so much that precisely the last and deepest strata be present, or even that they have had their formal elements clearly shaped, i.e., the two innermost strata in the background of poetry and music; more important is the series of the strata itself, its dissimilarities and its variety, and also the variety of the detail in them. These details, however, come under the purview of the pure bestowal of form or of the play with form.

Depth, therefore, does not depend at all upon the opposition between the relation of appearance and the play with form. No doubt it is true that the latter always seems shallow, considered in itself; similarly, that all deeper beauty depends on the relation of appearance. But the play with form can possess an extraordinarily deep sense, if it is itself stratified and each stratum displays independence. Also, the force of letting-appear is, in its case, tied in each stratum to the form-bestowal that is proper to it. For that reason, the main element in the effects caused by size and depth of a beautiful object is not so much the “absolute depth,” but rather the depth of the serial interconnectivity, one after the other.

This depth is thus the relative depth of the appearance-relation. But the effects it produces are not indifferent to how many varieties are contained in each individual stratum. In other words: their aesthetical meaning is also a function of the richness of the play with form. This was precisely what was demonstrated by the middle strata of music and literature in the richness of detail. And in painting, the situation was the same, only shifted somewhat to the external strata.

But we must in contrast establish that the aesthetical meaning of a multiplicity that has been given form in some specific stratum – one of the middle ones, perhaps – is in no manner a function of its independent beauty taken for itself. That might be conceivable in itself, for if there is at all beauty in the pure play with form, apart from the appearance-relation and independent of it, then it is reasonable to assume that, in the series of strata through which our eyes (249) pass, each stratum would have to display an independent beauty of form; and then one might also think that the result of formal beauty, in one stratum or in several, would have to be the diminishment of the aesthetic value, or even its complete elimination.

That would be an error. What is essential in its entirety for the aesthetic value of the whole is only the richness and variety of the details in the individual stratum – also, naturally, its unity – but not the independent beauty of form in it. This thesis is of course valid only in the representational arts; there it is well known. These arts can also very easily represent what is ugly, and they must do so when dealing with those themes that fall into its realm: in painting, primarily with the portrait, and in literature primarily with the description of characters and social settings.

In these cases, the middle strata may be filled with ugliness, so that for the supersensitive reader aesthetical enjoyment will vanish; but ugliness as material does not impede the beauty of form in other strata, and certainly does not impede the beauty of appearance.

d) Form and content in the structure of the strata

We said earlier that “form” and “content” do not drive themselves apart; indeed, they can hardly be brought into opposition. In fact, form itself is the content of the work of art, as is everywhere visible. What remains is the double opposition of “form and matter,” on the one hand, and “form and material” on the other. About these two, we saw that the bestowal of form on some material always takes place in matter, such that there is no question of two kinds of form-bestowal, but only of one.

As long as one understands “content” as “material,” there is no objection to putting “form and content” together. However, then the expression “content” extends also to what is universal in the final background stratum, which is never reducible to “material” without remainder.

As for the identity of form and content, which has often been asserted: the correct meaning of this assertion is a very simple and harmless one, but which has just always been falsely expressed. The content (material) [Stoff] of a work of art exists just only in the bestowing of form by the artist. What stands this side of the artistic bestowal of form is not at all the content of the work of art, but rather a kind of raw material to which the artist will bring life.

It is without doubt easy for non-artists to imagine the productive creativity of the artist. As little as one may really be able to understand that process of creation, one thing should be clear: even the creator does not bestow form only post hoc on the material he chooses, but is rather already testing himself in shaping just by his choice. And for the observer the material exists entirely “in” the form that is bestowed upon it.

That is verified once more when we apply here what was agreed upon earlier: the aesthetical bestowal of form upon some material is possible only by means (250) of extracting from the context of the real world that which has been torn asunder and muddled together by life by selection, omission, and condensation. That is itself already a bestowal of form upon material. This latter does not thereby become “identical” with form, but surely inseparable from it.

This corresponds also to the fact that we do not experience a piece of literature or a painting as having some sort of double nature, as form and content, but rather entirely as a closed whole, as a uniformly formed content, in which the two aspects cannot be distinguished as such. The distinction is made by an interpreter; quite often not even by him, but by a theoretician.

Only the theoretician makes us conscious of what we called transformation. This word means that the material already possessed form when the artist took it on. This form is stripped from its material and another form is bestowed upon it. Only by this means can this material become an element of the work. But it is just that fact that only the reflective person knows; the mere observer does not know it, and the creator does not need to “know” it. In his case, the inner eye simply “executes” the transformation.

In the non-representational arts, the situation is quite different. It would be false to let the content of music begin only in the inner strata, i.e., with the psychic element; rather it begins already in the compositional phase. But there it is identical with the bestowal of form.

We can say the same mutatis mutandis about architecture. The purposive composition and the spatial composition, and the dynamic composition, too, are eminently cases of the bestowal of form; but just these three constitute at the same time the essential content of architecture. Nothing is changed by the fact that there exists in architecture another “content” – an ideal one – beyond the first. But this other content too is one that, in the architectural work, has had form bestowed upon it – and not only “formed in stone,” but also formed upon its own level, i.e., as psychic content.

We need here to return once again to the question of ugliness as material of beauty – thus also as the “content” of beauty. Up to now we have shown, but only by means of some examples, that the arrangement of the strata and their transparency in series, one after the other, requires in no way that the bestowal of form upon each individual strata, seen each in itself, must be beautiful. In the representational arts, at least, certain middle strata – just where the riches of the content are unfolded – are compatible with a considerable dose of ugliness. This is true in the portrait, in the novel, and in drama.

The first explanation offered for this fact was that in these strata the richness of detail is at stake and not beauty of form; for the depth of beauty grows with the number and the riches of the strata through which the eyes pass. But this explanation is not sufficient – it is not, for example, for the fact that, in the arts that we have named as relevant, the appearance of ugliness in certain middle strata can have an intensifying effect, specifically giving depth and space for the beauty of the entire work. (251)

For this phenomenon, there are plausible reasons:

1. All content is subject to the phenomenon of contrast, and for that reason ugliness placed next to beauty lifts the latter into the light.
2. The representational arts must create a sense of real life; if not, they lack truth. Real life is only possible by admitting ugliness to one’s material.
3. A certain type of realism produces a sense of richness and abundance, whether or not for its beauty or for the lack of it. The question is only of building realism into a tightly framed space.

These points speak for themselves. What is important is that they are just as valid both forward and backward in the series of strata. In painting, for example, what is at stake is a beauty that is very much sensible and in the foreground – perhaps in a portrait of a notably ugly man. The ugliness in the bestowal of form upon the inner (deeper) stratum does not injure the convincing beauty of the ones further forward, for example, the shaping of space, light, color and motion (Franz Hals70, Goya⁷¹ …).

In literature, the reverse is usually the case: in the strata of motion and gesture and those of plot and situation a great deal of ugliness may be contained; that may be true also for the stratum in which what is pertinent to character is given form. That does not prevent a background beauty from becoming apparent in the next stratum in the series – perhaps that of human fate. Or again, it may appear deeper in the last strata. Here we are reminded of the characters of Raabe⁷² and of modern realistic novels, and also of Shakespeare’s or Ibsen’s characters. They are repulsive in many particulars, but precisely through them the total picture becomes colorful and rich and the lines of human destiny run deeper.

Of course, what is normal in literature is that aesthetically and morally repulsive elements do not appear in too great a measure in the middle strata – nonetheless, when they do, it is usually mixed with genuine traits of ugliness. We must be clear about this: as a rule, what in life is “morally ugly” (so we frankly call it) affects us also as aesthetically ugly. Among examples of this phenomenon belong licentiousness, weakness, slovenliness, inconsiderateness, and coarse egoism.

One could draw from this some support for the Aristotelian theory of [fear] and [dread]. Both express the idea that our feelings may flow along with the suffering of the literary character; however, it offers us too little, and one would have to add many other forms of this participation: hope, expectation, shared joys, shared loves and hates, anger, rejection etc.

Both the positive and the negative “draw us on”; they let us experience vicariously, and both are only transitions that allow the concrete pictorial appearance of something greater. This greater thing does not have to lie in [catharsis], and certainly not in some process within the observer. It must rather lie objectively in the picture of life that appears there. (252)

Chapter 19: Theory of the Bestowal of Form in Aesthetics

a) Aesthetical feeling for form

During the past centuries, the idea of a feeling for form has played a large role in aesthetics – a role that was naturally strongest where one had little thought for the relation of appearance, and tried instead to trace beauty solely to pure play with form. On the side of the act, the prevalent conception was that art was a matter of feeling, and the aspect of beholding was neglected.

It was pointed out earlier that one might note the beginnings of a feeling for form in quite primitive cases of formal beauty, viz., in “geometric beauty.” The examples given were the circle, the ellipse, the hyperbola, and the sphere – but also certainly rhomboidal or rectangular figures. We may rightly add the regular polygons along with stylized star-shapes.

There is not much to notice in these matters. If one is seeking a basis for the fact that such shapes are beautiful, one should not seek it in some far-off metaphysical or psychological subtleties, but in very simple and primitive conditions: for example, in the intuitively apparent and striking uniformity of the shape, in the readily apparent unity of multiplicity. Behind this also stands a dark consciousness of regularity or lawfulness, of which, however, the intuiting consciousness know nothing.

Thus far, we find nothing questionable about the idea of the feeling for form. Something questionable enters, however, as soon as one attempts to explain the phenomenon in a certain psychological way. And many such attempts have been made. They all commit the error of tracing the phenomena of beauty and the joy we take in it to considerations external to aesthetics.

Thus, for example, the point has been argued in the following way by (Eduard von Hartmann73): a broken line – perhaps one zigging and zagging – is more difficult to follow than a curving line or a wavy one, and therefore has a more unpleasant effect upon the eyes. For that reason, it is felt to lack beauty, while the wavy line seems beautiful. The basis for this is sought in the musculature of the eyes, which are forced constantly to readjust themselves for the zigzag. Something similar is sought even for the straight line as opposed to one that is slightly curved (and to this idea can be traced the avoidance of straight lines in Greek architecture).

With this kind of causal explanation of the feeling of form, we have a total confusion of distinct elements, and this indeed in more than one respect. First, aesthetic value is played off against the value of the pleasant, thus against a much lower region of value. Second, the explanation is not even purely psychological, but rather physiological, and therefore cannot grasp in the slightest the genuine aesthetical element in the intended feeling of form, i.e., the genuine aesthetical pleasure. Third, the argument is (253) also false in regard to its content. The zigzag line is usually not in fact taken in by “following” it, but rather entirely as a unified figure, i.e., by surveying it; the same is true for the wavy line. There is no basis therefore for assigning in this context grades of relative aesthetic value. And, even if there were such relative value, it must have another basis.

As was said, the other basis is discovered by sensing out, in the dark, as it were, an inherent lawfulness. That is entirely sufficient to explain the feeling of form of such a primitive kind. We just must not think that this “sensing out” is an intellectual process and pretend that it gives us a kind of secret knowledge.

In order to confirm such a correction, we find in the same theories examples of a dynamic kind that renounce all psychologizing and physiologizing and bring to the discussion argumentations of the aforementioned kind. For example, the curve described by a tossed stone is felt as beautiful because we sense intuitively at each moment in its flight the balance of impetus and gravity. One may proceed in a similar way in other areas: note the striking streamlined shape of the bodies of fish and birds; and, long before anyone had a dark sense of streamlining, there was an intuitive feeling for the inner lawfulness of this form. …

Such examples show clearly what the nature of genuine aesthetical feeling for form is: nothing of “pleasantness” or “able to be easily executed” stands behind it. Instead, there is an objective feeling that joins itself to an inward, fundamental, law-like state of affairs. One will not be mistaken in assuming that this kind of feeling leads us once again to the vicinity of the appearance-relation. One can just as well say: the law “appears” in the concretely intuited physical case; this case must therefore be transparent. And it might be conceivable that all this beauty in the play with form could in the end be traced back to appearance.

One can formulate this more generally: “form is felt to be beautiful when it allows a principle guiding form to be beheld.” In this way, the thesis is expressed in its greatest generality.

But there is a phenomenon that speaks against it: there exists also a kind of form that in fact does not allow a principle of form to appear and yet is felt to be beautiful, a form in which lawlessness and disorder is the beautiful, and is evident as such. Examples: the townscape of older towns that have grown up in different epochs: the bright diversity of different kinds of things placed together, yet which is deeply attractive. … Or: the form of a hamlet with red roofs lying in a green landscape with its irregular flowerbeds. … Or: the overlapping of the lines of hills and forest in a landscape … that is quite a disorder. Still more –mentioned earlier: the starry skies. Here we need to do violence to find a principle of order in the constellations … just as men did with respect to the mythical figures.

The solution of the problem: even the “fortuitous” is not entirely without a lawful principle, even if it is simply the law of “scattering.” This law, (254) which is traceable to the “law of big numbers,” is visible only where there is a great quantity of cases; where the number is smaller, its presence is extremely slight, and merely suggested.

But so things stand precisely with the examples we mentioned: the hamlet affects us randomly, as a matter of fact; and it has a kind of principle only in the unified shape of the courtyards, and that shape can attract notice even when one is standing at some distance. The landscape is more concise: many objects, similar in their kind and style, collect themselves together. … In the shapes of mountains and heights, however, certain oppositions of a material kind are set that speak to us precisely out of their apparent randomness (the lines of forests like flattened billows, distant lines of mountains with more or less steep ascents, slopes, and peaks …). This can arise reciprocally. These cases do not yet contain examples of “laws of contingency” of a truly great size – as, for example, globular star-clusters, whose form conspicuously has high aesthetic value.

b) Empathy and activity

We see from all of this that there is something right about a feeling for form, if one grasps it in a way that does justice to the phenomenon. This way of doing justice, however, has been disputed. One might have lent support to it on the side of the object by means of the concept of the quality of form in the sense of today’s Gestalt theories; but in earlier days, one did not yet possess such a concept.

And so some took risky detours. One of the strangest is that of the theory of empathy (Theodor Lipps, et al.). Taken strictly, the concept of empathy is an aesthetically extremely fecund one; it was only robbed of its value by a specific and much too complicated theory.

Consider: what can the artist painting a portrait do otherwise than “empathize” via the facial features of the person he is painting? Or the poet, who borrows from life a character for his drama? Any understanding that is analytical or psychological is insufficient in such cases, and it arrives too late on the scene. All depends upon intuitive vision, which, in passing, grasps what is essential by passing over it, and holds to its external signs. How does a man summon up such a capacity for intuitive vision, which simultaneously penetrates and lovingly extracts what is essentially human and valuable?

We know that in life such an understanding of another person is possible for one who loves him. The loving eye has an inward emotional tie to the object of his love. On this emotional side, everything depends; it is the element that opens and reveals in the act of beholding. It is no secret that the painter and the poet do basically the same. For even in their cases a certain love of the object, a willing submission and a devotion to it is a presupposition – only without the personal accent given in the real engagement with the person that genuine love requires. This kind of intuitive, strongly emotional appreciation, which lives, rejoices, and suffers along with another, but without real engagement with him, is the true sense of empathy. (255)

But in fact, only this sense is justified aesthetically. It corresponds to the first sense of the word: we mean by empathy with persons or with entire situations in life an emotional understanding with or a penetration into them.

Aesthetics should be satisfied with this analysis. For it is sufficient for the receptive act of the observer: one can say of him also that he “empathizes himself” into the characters and their social circumstances. And one ought not to let oneself be deprived of the good sense of such empathy. It is much to be regretted that this good concept of empathy, formed after nature, has been taken over by theories and disfigured. For there are arts where it is indispensable: music, architecture, and ornamental art. This is easy to see. Music deals with an inward, sympathetic vibration, an emotional moving-along with the dynamics of sound. Only in this way can the psychic content of the music communicate itself; for this content is nothing other than a pure emotional dynamic.

Music is the only art that penetrates human being in this way, directly and deeply grips him and makes him vibrate with the sound. A concept such as “empathy” is indispensable here. The one who listens to music genuinely “lives emotionally” with the music. In architecture one may at least speak of a felt rhythm of form (“Form” understood in the large sense as “composition”); and in ornamental art there is always a quiet engagement with the play of lines, a non-committal vibrating with them. Here also with form.

The addition “with form” is essential. For it is here alone that the concept of empathy belongs in a chapter on form. Here alone, too, one can extract it from its psychologistic disfigurement and, as it were, purify it!

The most powerful evidence that we are dealing with a feeling for form is found once again in music. Even a primitive feeling for music at least follows along inwardly with the rhythm of the beat: in dancing, in marching, even in working. Singing along inwardly or even aloud cuts more deeply … motifs, themes, melodies, entire phrases, intensification. In such cases, empathy goes very far. And one notes its force when it fails us entirely, when one rejects inwardly some “theme,” that is, one will not allow oneself to be gripped and moved by it; something in us resists feeling empathy, for example its tedium. Even moving in concert with the inner strata and their psychic content takes the entire pathway over musical form and empathy with it. It is just this last phenomenon that is itself at once empathy with the dynamics of feeling.

In the case of architecture, it is more difficult to state what empathy with form consists in. It does not have the general shape of an act of moving-with the object; architecture does not penetrate into us. Yet its forms engage us and draw us into a life that is not our own: we feel its dynamics, (256) feel its massiveness, feel its heavy weight that unfolds itself high above us, feel how it is kept within limits by its finely measured proportions, its overcoming of gravity, and its victorious superiority to it.

It is no different with poetry, although here the orientation of the reader towards themes and content clouds the feeling for form. In reality, the feeling shared with the hero is precisely feeling with form, but only with such form as constitutes the essential content of the character (the bestowal of form on character, on destiny …).

To that extent, empathy becomes indistinguishable from feeling for form. The psychology of empathy did not stop at that point, however. It wanted more, wanted to explain the phenomena, and to that end it invented a schema: the receptive subject of art was thought to be active in the object (looking at a cliff, one executes an act of “rising up”) – although it would then be difficult to understand how the enjoyment of one’s own activity could at the same time be the measure of the value of the object “in which” the subject is active. Even the examples are, in fact, treated quite arbitrarily. What comes out of this at best is an explanation in terms of psychological causes.

The only genuine and earnest question in this context is: is there an activity of the receptive subject in the aesthetic object? This question must be answered in the affirmative, but in a quite different sense than that understood by the psychology of empathy. Specifically, this activity does not consist in placing or projecting our feelings into the object, but in a reproductive viewing of a higher order, a beholding to which the background of the artwork appears stratum after stratum. This function of the activity is nothing new. It is identical with the role of the receptive subject in the fourfold relation that is peculiar to all objectivation. Insofar as that commonality is so, it does not even possess anything specifically aesthetical. It is contained in all acts of reading and understanding, even those of an intellectual kind. The difference is only that in the receptive understanding of the work of art it is closely tied to intuitive cognitive functions and to the inward “emotional” feeling-with the artistic form.

c) The bestowal of form and self-representation

To conclude these reflections we must be mindful of still another side of the principle of form, one that is self-evident, but too infrequently noted. It concerns the bestowal of form as objectivation – one should rather say, as the aspect of objectivation in the aesthetic object. But that means that in the act of bestowing form, the making-objective as such first becomes possible. That is well known. In this case, however, it is a question of the connection of this state of affairs to the feeling for form and empathy.

This objectivation plays no essential role where objective themes are already present. There the bestowal of form – and with that, objectivation – is only transformation, superformation, as we have seen earlier. This is the case especially in the representational arts (257), even though in them the bestowal of form is not at all absorbed by them. The form bestowed upon them is in fact quite different and ideal in nature.

But the process of making objective is of great significance in the non-representational arts, in music and architecture; for there it is precisely a question of first making tangible something that exists in us in a non-objective manner by means of bestowing form and objectivation. In music, the structure of tones is such a process of objectivation by means of the bestowal of form – and, indeed, in this case by a freely invented process of forming that had never before been heard in the world. That which has been made tangible in this bestowal of form, however, is the flowing and surging of the life of the soul, its most tender and soft arousal, its vacillations and its sorrows, its strength and struggles, its storms and its defeats, none of which can be made tangible in any other way.

If one considers soberly what that means in fact, and what therefore is the essence of the bestowal of form as objectivation, one must say: it is nothing less than this, that man himself becomes visible – or, perhaps: that he comes to stand before himself, not that he simply experiences himself, but rather that he catches sight of himself. But he can become visible to himself only as an object; only as object does he stand outside himself. This being outside of oneself produces the objective bestowal of form.

In architecture, this making an object of oneself is a dark, puzzling process, but it is no less effective. What is incomprehensible about human nature expresses itself entirely in forms that seem to have nothing to do with man; yet precisely as his way of expressing himself these forms possess the traits of his nature and are thrust before our eyes.

“Visibility” can be taken literally. One may add: this incomprehensible nature is thrust into the most coarse matter and in the most intrusive and permanent manner thrust before our receptive eyes. Man is always building; when he builds his house, he builds himself: that is, he builds the expression of his own will to live, his ideal of himself (as with clothing), and even his mis-understanding of himself.

The same can be said, in a much weaker way, for ornamental art. In one respect the making an object of oneself here is perhaps purer: it is the mere play with form as such, and is further removed from practical ends. And even its obvious relation to playfulness, which takes its place here at a certain elevation, is revealing. It betrays the presence of man where he does not expect to appear. All play is transparent.

In this respect, the difference between representational and non-representational art in the problem of form does not loom large, as one would normally expect. The secret here is simply that man presents himself within all the arts, even when he is working to bestow form of a completely different type.

But we must understand in no way this “oneself” in a personal sense. The term usually refers to something more general, usually to a type of human being, but it can also refer to all that is human. This is entirely true even of the apparently individual self-representation of an artistic personality; e.g., of the self-portrait by a painter or a confessional novel (258) by a writer representing his own life. In the hands of a significant artist all material extends into a wider and impersonal context, and it is precisely for that reason that he can find the widest echo.

Here music has an advantage over literature. What it communicates in its inner strata about the psychic life remains always on a certain general level. People have called this the “indeterminacy” of music, and characterized it as a failing (Hegel, Vischer74). Yet it is also an advantage. For this is the root of its capacity for free interpretation; specifically, that one and the same piece of music can mean very different things to different listeners. The way form is bestowed upon it is not like that upon an individual object – a given human figure – but from the outset upon what is typically human. And that is the reason why in vocal music there is always something left over from the room to maneuver between words and music.

What is truly amazing about this is that concreteness is nonetheless not absent. The clarity of form in the realm of the audible is something entirely different from the realm of the visible: in the latter, it remains tightly attached to the individual object (material, motif) and cannot be separated from it; in the former, on the contrary, it is tied to the musical motif and to the structure of the composition. The “motif,” however, bears the psychic material; it is never identical to it regarding content, for it transcends it with respect to its level.

d) Disengagement from the creator by means of form

Form as an objectivation of the selfhood of the artist – all the same whether conscious or unconscious – cannot be underrated, because upon it the elements of self-consciousness and self-understanding depend. The same holds, therefore, for what Hegel called the “being for itself of spirit.” One may add to this that it was not incorrect of him to attribute the arts to the “absolute spirit” – if we assume that knowledge of itself makes spirit “absolute.”

However, that absoluteness no longer belongs to the genuine aesthetical character of art: it is rather one of the general cultural functions that it has to fulfill; one could almost call it art’s metaphysical function. For in fact there are things that humankind learns through art and only through it. Unquestionably, these learned things concern man himself. Aesthetics concerns itself with man only peripherally, and it was Hegel’s error to pretend that this metaphysical function was the aesthetical essence of the matter. These were the remains, as it were, of an intellectualistic aesthetics.

What in contrast is important and central to aesthetics moves along a line opposite to this phenomenon: specifically, in the work of art the artist disappears, he does not speak and testify to himself there, but to something else entirely. From the standpoint of the observer, one could express the matter as follows: he observes the artwork in complete detachment from its creator. The work has disposed of the subjectivity of the creator; it left that subjectivity behind along with his individuality, his sufferings and struggles – it left behind also the sweat and toil he put into the work. (259)

One who is learned in history can of course recognize the peculiarities of the artist in his work; but that is no longer a form of aesthetical understanding but rather one proper to historical and theoretical comparative analyses. It is the science of art. For it is not the enjoyment of art, not to mention an aesthetical beholding of it.

This is also the reason why research into the personality of an artist offers us nothing that could open his works to us. No doubt, it can contribute to our understanding of the origins of the work, or to that of its subject matter; but it is neither an aesthetical beholding nor an aesthetical enjoyment. This is especially true for the question of “origins.” There is nothing more indifferent to a measured aesthetical understanding than the history of the origins of a work – except insofar as one gets something of its history from beholding it aesthetically. This is true of architectural works whose elements were erected in different centuries, or where they have been continuously added to. When an art historian comes to us with a chronology and ties the history of the building to the fate of its community, we find him interesting and instructive, but this information has another kind of educational function. But why a certain structure seems beautiful, although people ventured upon its construction without concern for questions of form, while another structure seems disturbing in contrast – that one cannot explain in an art-historical way.

If we compare the detachment of the work of art from its creator with the element of self-consciousness and with the process by which a living mind becomes an object to itself, we are led to a kind of antinomy. On one side, the work speaks eloquently of its creator, but on the other, it is expressly silent about him. It reveals and it hides, it betrays and it keeps its silence. Both are clearly essential, even if they are not both aesthetically essential in the same way.

How may this antinomy be resolved? And is it one, really? One can deny the latter: the opposition is not an inward one, it is only apparent. The creator, in fact, does not speak of himself, he does not even portray himself in the genuine sense –not even when he produces a self-portrait – he is concerned even then with something else – but he does speak of or testify to the entire spirit of what he is engaged in, and out of which he creates. For no one, even the most original mind, creates simply out of his own subjectivity, as though he stood alone in the world for himself; every creator creates out of the objective spirit as it embeds itself historically in events into which he has grown, and as it creates within him. He also becomes creative when he himself has grown artistically out of and beyond that spirit.

Thus, the antinomy is resolved. The work, and the specific forms it possesses, is the witness of an historical spirit, now made objective; but the personality of the artist and its subjectivity has nevertheless disappeared into the form bestowed upon the material, even though that bestowal was executed by that personality. The latter point can be clearly appreciated from cases where it is not known with any certainty whether some portrait is a self-portrait (260) or not; similarly with events described in some literary work where it cannot be determined whether it has been taken from a personal experience of the writer or not.

The uncertainty of the self-revelation in a work of art corresponds to this fact. The genuine artist does not know what he does in bestowing form upon his material according to his way of seeing things, such that one may recognize that way of seeing in the forms bestowed, and even be drawn by it to learn how to see. The artist does not know how much he gives form to a part of himself in the creative process, and even less to his personal existence as part of a common life and as part of an historical epoch.

And in the same way, the observer of the work is ignorant of what he sees in the formal structure of the work when it gives to him intuitively something essential about the historical spirit of an epoch. It is easy for him to err in two ways. Either he takes what he has been given as the personhood of the artist, a very frequent misapprehension, or he completely misunderstands the spiritual posture, now become object and form, out of which the work has been created. Nonetheless, since he is the mere follower who no doubt reflects clearly upon his looking and enjoying, it is more likely that he and not the creator will know what spirit has been communicated to him.

This notion also corresponds nicely to the phenomenon of disengagement. It means only that the law of objectivation for a work of art has been obeyed. This law asserts the state of separation of the formed matter from the connection to the living spirit in which it had grown, and also its state of release from it. For in the fourfold relation of objectivation the mind of the creator is the most transitory, and the observer’s mind, which lives in its own time and receives the objectivation, comes into its justified place – so long as it is adequate to receiving it. The objectivation itself, however, which makes this reception possible, consists in the bestowal of form upon some enduring matter, on the condition that this matter is transparent for the entire series of strata that depend upon it.

Chapter 20: On the Metaphysics of Form

a) Imitation and creativity

If we survey what has been said about aesthetical form, we will not be mistaken to think the outcome very small – in comparison with what we would like to know about it, and what constitutes its mystery. We sense clearly this mystery throughout; sense it behind all partial definitions that can be given of it. But it is difficult even to indicate just in what it consists.

The difficulty has its basis in the incomprehensibility of beauty: incomprehensible, specifically, in a way different both from aesthetical beholding and the value-indicators that pertain to it, i.e., enjoyment and pleasure. If we could also comprehend the beautiful as such in a different way, then the different way of comprehending would also have to be an aesthetical form of comprehending. But there is no second kind of aesthetical comprehending, but only beholding accompanied by pleasure. We must remember this in order to protect ourselves from false expectations. Aesthetics (261) cannot make the impossible possible any more than any other science can.

What would we have to know about form? Nothing less than why one form seems beautiful and the other one ugly. Thus we wish to solve the mystery of the beautiful with one blow. And, besides, we want the impossible: we want to comprehend with our understanding and its coarse tools, i.e., with concepts, what only aesthetical beholding can comprehend.

To make this situation clear it is sufficient to realize that making such demands of aesthetics is utopist. Aesthetics may not allow them, for then it would of necessity become metaphysical. The academic study of art can thus respond to these demands only partially, at least as far as it is dealing with those parts of the question that can be answered by reference to larger empirical materials. But this study, taken strictly, also leads us beyond facts, and therefore does not arrive, in the end, at the reasons for the beauty of certain forms and not of others.

It is hence understandable that aesthetical theories have stumbled when they treated these questions. Most of them become quite metaphysical in the course of their work, but other theories sought to extract themselves from metaphysics by genetic-psychologist routes. Some even wandered along mathematical-speculative detours, for example the theory of the “golden ratio,” and also via the mathematical analysis of music. Some of these attempts were dealt with in the course of our earlier chapters and discarded. We dealt more recently with the psychological aesthetics of empathy, and at the start of our inquiry with the ancient aesthetical of ideas and its later influence upon German idealism.

We could not dispose of the latter tradition entirely, for there hides within it elements of reflection that even a more cautious analysis could not entirely dismiss – for example in the problem of beauty in nature and, more narrowly, of human beauty, specifically where it concerns the forms of living creatures. Yet in all the arts it fails totally, and it is just this failure that led aesthetics, quite logically, to the relation of appearance.

Of course, one may become suspicious when one sees that this relation still is not sufficient to account for all problems of beauty – suspicions that lead one precisely towards another mystery, one yet hiding in the form of the object. Here all further reflections are subject to a limit imposed by the fact that between the bestowal of form and appearance a much more narrow relationship becomes visible than one would expect at first. It has just been shown that in the work of art a relatively independent kind of form-bestowing governs from stratum to stratum, and in such a manner that all appearance of deeper backgrounds depends upon the preceding form in the series.

In principle, there are only two possibilities for treating aesthetical form beyond the phenomena already discussed. Either one may seek the foundation of the beauty of form in the object, even if entirely hidden in its backgrounds, or one may seek it in the subject. The (262) first tendency has led to a metaphysics of ideas, the second to the psychology of empathy.

We can press forward a bit on both sides without engaging in excessive speculation. In the direction of the object, we find the old theory of imitation, while in the direction of the subject that of autonomous creativity: [mimesis] and [poiesis]. Both of these theories have made little progress. Yet both of them contain a very serious core idea.

[mimesis] – we should translate it as “representation” – is based on the thought: no man can create objects more perfect than those in nature; he can only imitate them. The same is true of the human scene: no poet can contrive conflicts, destinies of deep significance, or greater undertakings than real life contains, he can only represent what he experiences.

In contrast, [poiesis] is founded in the thought that there are spiritual creations that are otherwise foreign to nature and life. They are clearly present in music, in architecture, and even in ornamental art; and beyond them, also in poetry and the fine arts, so far as they manifest things that the layman does not see in real life.

These two foundational thoughts are justified each in its own way, and for that reason we must take them into account. Clearly, it is a question of establishing a unity among them. And perhaps from its very origins the error in them was simply that they appeared separate from each other.

What therefore can we recover from the idea of ? It will help to limit this question initially to the representational arts. We can in any case extend the question later as needed. Consider: to outdo the forms of living things would be manifestly the greatest madness of man: forms of human fantasy can hardly outdo the leaping deer, the circling falcon, and the diving shark. Therefore it cannot be the task of art to do so. So far as art “represents” such natural forms, it can only attempt to imitate them, where “representation” in itself is naturally something different. This is true also for the human shape, the human face, and its expressions (mimicry).

But two things must be noted. 1. Artists usually do not create forms of living things just for their sake alone; they are not competing with nature, neither in sculpture nor in painting. The first concentrates almost entirely upon the human body, the second upon man himself or upon the landscape, but there another principle of the bestowal of form effectively enters.

For to that must be added 2. Even the most perfect forms of nature, of living things and human beings, only become aesthetic objects when there arises a subject capable of understanding them properly. The act of the artist, therefore, as over against forms in nature possessing beauty, is precisely that of first discovering them. To “imitate” what is perfect is perhaps in fact (263) the lesser part of the aesthetical mission; the greater and more primary is to lean to see, to seek and find, to dwell with and learn to gaze lovingly.

In this sense it is true that the painter – and yet not before his art reached a certain level of development – was the first to discover “the landscape” and thereupon also taught the layman to see nature for himself. In the same sense it is true that the portraitist teaches us to look into faces, the poet into characters and destinies, the sculptor into the dynamics of the human body. If one, in face of all that experience, still wishes to be faithful to art as imitation, so be it. But it does not touch the essence of the case, to say nothing of the element of transformation, which was discussed above.

And what is of permanent value in the idea of , understood strictly as “creative”? We have already referred to the non-representational arts, which bestow a kind of form that does not exist outside of art; this is seen most clearly in music. Here we find an enormous realm in which forms are created that are purely acoustical – not transformed, but a construction of new forms that is absolutely creative. The expression, “pure play with form” refers perfectly to this. It is similar in architecture, and to a much lesser degree in ornamental art.

It is of greater importance in this context that the representational arts manifest the same creative character in the bestowal of form, although they are limited to their “models,” i.e., sujets, themes typically taken from life, and cannot dispense with this touch of imitation, with which our discussion of aesthetical form began (Chaps. 16c and 17a).

To “reconstruct,” to “transform,” – those words are much too weak. There exists also a purely synthetic bestowal of form in art that brings in something quite new: figures born from an idea, arising out of creative beholding, in opposition to reality and to everything empirical.

Renaissance painting created such ideal types in its Madonnas, saints, and Christ-figures. Michelangelo purposely created titanic figures that were larger than life. In the same line of development, we find the carved divinities of the ancient world, even their statues of youths. We can say the same for most epic poems: they are songs of heroes that contain a tendency toward the creation of ideal figures. And we cannot deny that such art – along with many missteps into the false and the unnatural – also produced genuine creations with an inner truth and power: figures that shone prophetically into the future and could instruct entire generations of a people.

We see, therefore, that the synthesis of imitation and autonomous creativity is not at all difficult to find. The two elements simply do not relate to the same features of the same objects, but to very disparate things. A fruitful art can never distance itself from life and from reality. For that reason, an element of must always remain in it. It must always root itself in real (264) life, whose developed forms are also the formal motifs of its creations. Looked at otherwise: an art form can become great and tower above its own times only when it has traces of the visionary within it that lead beyond this real life; when it can creatively behold what does not exist and yet convinces because it points beyond this real life while yet being a part of it. No genuine antinomy, therefore, created the conflict of and .

b) The finding of form and the phenomenon of style

If one is convinced that, along with art’s ties of dependency to the fullness of life, there is also in art’s bestowing of form an entirely creative element, then the question of creativity becomes even more insistent. For we must locate the form that is creatively constructed. The main issue remains: how do we find it?

Once more, we stand here before one of those forbidden questions, where we know that it is beyond the capacity of our judgment to resolve it, but we also cannot restrain ourselves from asking it. What we want to know is just this: how the artist manages to find a form that is not given. We wish to look at the cards he is playing, wish to penetrate the secret of genius – that means: to penetrate to where the artist himself does not know the answer, to where his mysterious activity is beyond the reach of his consciousness and must await an epiphany. But even that event does not reveal to him what happened in him and how he brought it about; it reveals only what the form he was seeking is, and how he can hit upon it rightly in this given case.

We know of a silent maturing that the creative person cannot much alter by his will alone; at the most he can eliminate obstacles to the process. He can unburden or distract himself when he seems to have run aground, but he cannot alter the condition itself. We know also how, for a great master, the condition can be a torment: he can be filled with a sense of failure, with impatience, with pain. Schelling knew something of this torment and tried to express it: the artist bears a destiny within himself; the work yet unborn is that destiny. And what is strange is that after its birth, the work says absolutely nothing about all of that: everything in it is settled; it presents the appearance only of a superior silent greatness.

All this tells us, once again, that we cannot penetrate the mystery of how the artist finds his forms: of why, of all avenues in aesthetics, the way to the penetration of the creative act of the artist is the least accessible. Nothing is more tightly closed to us than that. Here we stand directly before the “metaphysics of form,” without being able to find our way into it. Nonetheless, a few elements – viewed from the outside – can be distinguished: the inward telos of the work, the accident of inspiration, and the springing up of style in history. (265)

The first element expresses itself clearly in the striving of the artist. But this striving takes shape only in the work itself. We know that the inner telos of the unborn work holds the artist in its power, it gives him no rest, drives him to experiments, sketches, new initiatives. But from what direction comes this telos that holds him in its grip cannot be determined. It arises in the mind of the artist, but only negatively: in the form of dissatisfaction with what his attempts have achieved up to now. What underlies his achievement bears the imprint of this vision at a certain stage of its development. But the workings of the artistic imagination upon its impressions cannot be specified. Only the striving towards new forms is conscious. The work of the creator is in this way somewhat related to a natural process, as real genius is a gift of nature. But the element of the telos distinguishes itself from natural processes decisively here.

The second element, accident, is in some respects easier to trace. It offers the inspiration, the material, and the sujet. But it does not explain why the artist takes up what he has been offered by a chance encounter, or how he recognizes his own aptitudes in it. We may assume that the telos appears before him darkly, and the inspiration “approaches” him. But how that happens remains in darkness.

In the middle of his daily life, he is struck suddenly by a scene, of which he has been the accidental witness, or by a living human figure or a peculiar destiny. Something inside him leaps to grasp it. But he takes what has happened not as it is, but shapes it into something different – in the sense of an inner picture that had already passed before his mind. And he is a genuine poet only when he knows how to give it form such that it transcends itself – not by becoming false to itself, but by becoming the revelation of a truth beheld in the mind.

The painter does the same: he strolls between forest and heath and suddenly a view holds him fast: a motif, which he immediately beholds inwardly as a picture; a face detains him. Think also of how the “accidental” framing of the view – the eyes pass through branches, or between the trunks of trees, or through an opening in an old wall – acts to shape images. We call these things “accidents.” And it is only by chance that it encounters the artist; but the fact that he grasps it, values it, assesses it, that he paints it, is not accidental, but the work of the telos in him.

We see that telos and chance, although opposed to each other ontically, not only take to each other very well, but belong closely and essentially together, and supplement each other in the process of discovering form. The artist’s purposive search for form is perhaps impotent without the helpful work of chance; but the favorable chance event would be meaningless and squandered without the purposive searching of the artist.

We must not be afraid to give “chance” or accident its due. One does not deny all value to genius if we do. In the end, genius is not the capacity to make use of chance or even to recognize its favors. Naturally, we mean here by “chance” the “unintentional,” thus the opposite of telos, not the indeterminate. The accidental (266) in this sense is precisely what ontic necessity is. But this form of necessity does not concern aesthetics at all.

Style may be the most important of these elements. It consists in a certain formal character or schema that is not discovered by an individual. It is given shape by an entire epoch, but the individual is carried along by it in his own search for form. Objectively, it is for this reason also universal, and is not absorbed by any individual work. In times when a certain style is “dominant,” it is what determines all individual form in advance – not totally, but it establishes a certain direction for it. Moreover, the phenomenon of style is differentiated: There are particular styles, folk-styles, local ones, those peculiar to stages of life, even the highly personal style of specific masters.

But the great epochal styles are most significant. They manifest the characteristic peculiarities of the entire objective spirit. For as long as they live within some creative activity, they belong to the objective spirit; only for its epigones are they attached to objectivation alone. Style has its foundation in the sensibility of human beings for form; only secondarily does it appear in works, released from the creative and observant spirit. Style is the element of form in aesthetical “taste,” and therefore it changes along with taste. Styles grow up and disappear, and it is always individual artists whose creations bring about that change. But the individual does not create style; it works itself out in the creative activity of generations. And when it has been worked out, it dominates human sensibility for form, and the need for it.

We must think of this domination of style as the inability of a person who lives in its time and its way of life to ever think that people could create things in any other way. The prototype for this is found in architecture, from which the concept of style is taken and only subsequently extended to other areas. The reasons for this lie in the practical ends of architecture, and other factors (Cf. Chap. 15c).

It should also be observed that style does not refer only to the arts, but to the entire way of life of a people – down to its ways of interpersonal relations, of forms of speech and movement, not to speak of clothing and fashion. Thus we speak with some justification of a style of life. And one cannot deny that there exists an inclusive unified phenomenon of style in all these areas. The consequence of this is that there exist epochal styles that in fact include several or all areas. The Rococo manifests the same elegant flourishes in both speech and music as also in its forms of architecture and furniture or in attire.

We see from this that style is a concept that extends beyond aesthetics; it belongs to the further circle of phenomena of the objective spirit of history. Here we are concerned only with artistic style. And it is characteristic of this style that it constitutes a way in which form may be bestowed, or a general pre-determination of possible individual forms, which strips from the artist (267) part of his role in the discovery of form, and just in that way also limits his freedom of activity.

This and nothing else is what we refer to when we say a specific form “dominates.” And, as with all domination of objective intellectual forms, we have here also cases of the individual breaking through the dominant form. When this happens, there can be confusion and formlessness, but the break can also offer a genuine roadmap for the discovery of new forms.

More than this cannot be said. It is only the great masters that achieve such breakthroughs, as also in other areas of the objective spirit, for example in linguistic innovation. Artistic style marks a limit to the free discovery of form, to the playful imagination that shapes form, but style is itself form that has been already discovered and marked as such. It is a type of form-bestowal.

What one wishes to know beyond this is how such new form is “found”; how the creative imagination first goes about shaping it, and why this specific type of form-bestowal becomes evident, pleases, and affects others. Analysis cannot determine any of that.

c) The great styles of art and fashion

The circle of problems that concern the bestowal of form, the finding of form, and the fixed types of form, becomes considerably larger when one relates these problems to the series of strata in the work of art. For initially all bestowal of form relates to one specific stratum. That is true also for styles. But because the bestowal of form upon one stratum is precisely what gives it transparency for other strata, and these in turn must have their own formal shape, forms – and also types of forms – link together, the one linking into the other.

One should compare to this what was said in Chaps. 17b–d and in Chap. 18a about the hierarchy of form. We learned there that in the overlapping of the strata, the bestowal of form on each individual stratum is both autonomous and dependent; further, that the variegated riches of a work depend on the element of autonomy in the bestowing, but the relation of appearance depends on the element of its dependency. Both are thus essential. But what will this mean if we relate it to the forms of style? To which stratum are the great styles attached? Are they attached to one only, or to several at the same time?

In the case of the painter, does the bestowal of form lie in the brush strokes, in the handling of light, in the ordering of spatial relations, in the dominance or absence of contours (in what pertains to drawing), in the manner in which animation and movement are made to appear, etc. – or does it lie in all these things together, or is there a preference for one of these elements? And if the bestowal of form lies in several of them, that is, if it is distributed through several strata of the painting, how do things then stand with the relationship among the acts of form-bestowing in the strata? Is one stratum given preference? And why?

One expects to receive a uniform summary answer to these questions. But such an answer cannot be given. Rather, the conditions of the dependency (268) of form in the strata come in various grades, and are once again isolated for individual strata and cannot be transferred to others.

Some of this can be demonstrated. For example, it is obvious that in a painting the treatments of space and light must be closely related, because space and light are indivisibly connected in natural conditions of vision; that in the foreground strata the application of paint still has broad latitude in contrast to the treatment of space and light. The same is true for the treatment of the contours of things that lie deeper in the background. Still deeper in the inner strata, the appearance of animation and life may be essentially co-determined by all the others. Correspondingly, in the work itself the relation of form in the external strata (e.g., the structure of space and light) must be already determined by a telos that aims at allowing motion and life to appear.

Aesthetics cannot follow into its details these relationships among forms. They are too complicated and subtle to allow it. It helps little to compare them to relationships in other arts. In literature, for example, the situation is similar –only that there the outer and inner strata are more clearly distinct from each other in the networks of form-bestowal that belong together.

In contrast one can certainly determine, though only within certain limits, on which strata of a work of art – either for the most part or entirely – style depends. Even this question cannot be answered in a uniform way, for it is precisely styles, understood as types of form-bestowal, which are in this respect different. As in life, too, we can speak in part of the style of a person either as a whole or in part as the style of his external demeanor.

This results in differences in depth among styles. First the well-known styles typical of an epoch stand out; it has long been noted how they include all sides of human life. We speak of “gothic man,” et al. Of course such things can be considerably exaggerated, and that is not without danger; in any real historical human types are mixed many sorts of forms of varying provenance. Nonetheless, it is true that many aspects of life take part in these unities of form. It is likewise true that in the arts such unities dominate in more than one stratum.

It is not necessary to struggle to sketch out conceptually what is meant by these epochal styles. The essence of the bestowal of form cannot be expressed in any other way than the arts themselves do. It is entirely sufficient to point out the best-known styles. One cannot describe them to anyone who is not “familiar” with them, and anyone who is familiar with them does not need to have them described. It is left to the philosopher only to point out the inflexible form-types in them and to appeal to the aesthetical feeling for them. So we as epigones can easily grasp the unity of the classical Greek styles (with their subgroups) of the fifth century in their temples, their (269) figures of gods, their frieze-reliefs, and in their lyric and tragic poets. Beyond those, there are many others.

One can demonstrate, with reference to such styles, in which strata of the work of art they are primarily effective in determining form. Clearly, they function in ways that determine form in the entire series of strata; most visibly, to begin with, in the bestowal of form in the real foreground, but also no less in the deeper outer strata and the inner strata of the background – in many varieties and grades – but perhaps least of all in the final strata, which contain what is purely ideational in nature.

The reason we first notice the great epochal styles in architecture is because styles are most visible when they appear in the foreground: precisely in architecture, the foreground is a pure, almost detached, bestowal of form upon matter –without the pretense of representing anything. Whoever looks more deeply will no doubt note the style in the composition of ends and space, as also in the dynamic composition – and, beyond that, in the will to create and bestow form that drives the entire undertaking.

Antique tragedy impresses above all by its linguistic and choral forms (in the songs). Later we recognize the same type of form-bestowal in the movements of the figures, if not to speak of “play,” and, behind this, in the way the situation and action are composed, and then even more forcibly in the bestowal of psychic form upon the persons (characters), and perhaps with even greater power in the working-out of the formal structure of man’s fate in its entirety.

It is easy to see that the same is true of the literature of other times and other styles. One thinks of the great epics of the thirteenth century (Wolfram75, Gottfried⁷⁶ , et al.), which are structured through and through by the styles of their epoch (the High Gothic) down to the content of their leading ideas – whether religious or chivalric. There are middle strata here, too, that show this best. The manner in which the figures move, grasp their situation, act within it; how their personality is shaped by these means (the figures of Hagen [von Tronje] or Rüdiger [Markgraf Rudeger von Bechelaren]), and how their destinies are marked out, etc.

This homogenous shaping throughout many strata constitutes the dominance of great styles. To a certain extent this is true even of the shaping of great art, but there, of course, exceptions are found precisely among the greatest creative artists, because they are also the breakers of conventional forms.

In clear opposition to this are acts of form-bestowal that have the same ambition but where in fact form does not penetrate the entire work homogeneously, and extends only to individual strata. What usually happens then is that form attaches itself only to the outer strata, or simply to the sensible foreground. We find such styles among individual artists, or tight groups of them. If they possess great genius, they may produce thorough formal structures throughout, but they may also end attaching themselves only to externals – for example, they many not concern themselves with imposing structure upon their material – and then, in the place of style, we have “fashion.” (270)

“Fashion” is thus to be distinguished from genuine style – even from a very individual one – by the absence of formal structures that are related to one another through many strata, and whose nature is determined by and along with the inner strata.

This is true also of the imitation of styles by the disciples of some master. People have asked: why is it that architectural works produced today in the Romanesque or Gothic style do not genuinely affect us, but rather seem almost unharmonious and ugly? The answers given are all expressive of the thought that throughout them we sense something that is not organic, unmotivated, external, even misunderstood. That is true. But what does it consist in?

It is easy to give an answer when we follow the gradations of form in each of the strata. Imitation never begins by composing with the ends of the structure in mind, to say nothing of the spatial or dynamic composition; it starts instead by bestowing form upon the external formal motifs, whose meaning is not understood; thus, for example, with certain sections of the façade, or the arrangement of interior spaces. The imitators do not understand that the strata of the composition determine these elements (according to practical ends, space, and dynamics). For their aims and building techniques are of quite a different kind.

Therefore, the best imitative work seems to lack organic integrity. The builder no longer senses the inner necessity of the form. He forces them upon a building that has been planned in an entirely different way.

d) A sensible interpretation of speculative theses

To conclude our reflections upon the metaphysics of aesthetical form we may say that we cannot trace to their very origins and solve the puzzles that are contained in their positive content. For that reason the nature of formal beauty is a genuine metaphysical problem. Still, we can, to a fairly large extent, point to the conditions that a metaphysics must meet, specifically with reference to the inner relations between the forms of various kinds that are superimposed within one and the same work of art.

But then what is most positive in what we are able to claim falls again upon the relation of strata and appearance. Moreover, much remains valid in what older theories of a speculative kind have discerned. Thus we have, for example, the old theory of unity in multiplicity, which no doubt is a theory of an ontological and not a purely aesthetical kind; however, it attains a strictly aesthetical meaning if we understand it as the intuitable unity of a multiplicity that is also just as intuitable.

There are many kinds of unities in multiplicity: every concept is one, every state of affairs, every heavenly body, every dynamic structure, every organism. … But nowhere does the unity or the multiplicity depend upon intuition; in aesthetics, in contrast, we have to do not with a merely existing unity, but with the unity that we are able to feel in an act of beholding. That is what is new in it. And that in fact is true of all kinds of aesthetic objects, especially the works of non-representational arts (music, ornamental art), as much as beautiful objects in nature. The test by example (271) is the challenge made to intuition, or, one may also say, the effort that intuition must bring to the challenge – not only to conceive of form creatively, but just as much merely to understand it aesthetically.

The effort of intuition is inconsiderable when it is a question of superficial and simple art – but of course it can already be a considerable challenge to persons untutored by the Muses. In the case of richer and deeper art, in contrast, it can require a considerable synthetic achievement of inward reflection.

Examples of this will be found neither in ornamental art nor in light fiction; nor, perhaps, in architecture, also, except for monuments. Important works in the other arts are full of examples: Shakespearian characterizations of human figures demand the application of synoptic intuition, for the characters are not spelled out in advance, but are given to us in their actions and passions, and a person who does not possess a mature understanding of human affairs will not find his way into their inner being. Similar reflections apply to the portraits by Holbein77 or Frans Hals.

This phenomenon is most familiar in music. Every larger “movement” of a sonata or a symphony requires of the listener a large-scale musical synthesis; and innumerable listeners, however much they may be moved by it, do not arrive in any sense at understanding its unity and inner structure (its construction, its structural autonomy). They lack a capacity for musical activity, that is, having present to their intuition the sounds just heard and those that are yet to come. This is most forcibly the case with fugal (polyphonic) music: that is why so many musically trained persons fail in their hearings of the creations of Bach. Most people, of course, do not know how badly they fail, because there is no entryway for them into the inner structure of the fugue, for the theoretical entryway, not the one “heard,” does not help them at all; they therefore have no way of measuring what passes them by unawares. This latter point is true in all of the arts for all failures of synthetic intuition.

The old idea of essential form or ideal form retains certain significance in the context of the old notion of the unity of multiplicity, but no doubt also only with many exceptions. Naturally, it can no longer be a question of substantial forms, though they were once accepted as obvious, and thought of as metaphysically constant and eternal models. However, there exists in fact an ideal form for every formal type that is perceivable empirically, in which the type is marked purely, regardless of whether such a thing occurs in the real world or not. Artistic imagination can, with relative ease, take what it encounters as a type, lift it over itself, and direct it towards its ideal form (its perfection). That process is indispensable to art down even to the details of how art bestows form upon its material. For that process simplifies matters; it extracts what is essential and makes it intuitively comprehensible, reduces complexity, and those things that appear in real life as mixed and confused are given a certain plastic outline. (272)

Thus the antique tragic poets raised their heroes upward to the level of an ideal type of human being; the figures acquired in that way something lapidary, their elevation exaggerated; they stood spiritually upon buskins. And much that was vividly human remained in those types. One expects just such conditions in all heroic poetry. The epics of peoples is full of them, and sculpture too – even in works that claim a likeness as in portraiture (the “Pensieroso”⁷⁸). Painting has such types also (the Madonnas …).

These examples demonstrate that we no longer have to do with a metaphysics of form. Ideal forms of this kind are not taken from reality, not even from an already existing realm of ideal being, but they have been fully shaped by the artistic imagination.

Here we have a place for new productive work, the size of which it would be difficult to exaggerate. It is given to the artist to behold ideas, and to show what he has beheld to others. No doubt not all the ideas he has beheld (e.g., human ideals) will be groundbreaking for those who experience them second-hand, but there are always such that do so. And in that way the artist becomes a bearer of ideas. This is without doubt seen most vividly in the poet. In ages when a higher ethos begins to form in the minds of a people, it is always the poets – that is, the epic poets – who hold the ideal image of man and virtue before the people’s eyes that define the ethos against which the people must measure themselves, and, in fact, do so measure themselves. These poets are the genuine teachers and shapers of whole generations.

This role of teacher is possible because the creative mind enjoys a freedom in his observation and his work that men in general do not have, not even in their ethos. This kind of freedom in aesthetics and art is quite different from moral freedom. For the latter is tied to commands (values), and, with respect to them, moral freedom is the freedom to decide only for or against them. Artistic freedom in contrast can be the pioneer in first beholding the values themselves, and placing them before the minds of others.

Such a freedom can reach as far as it wishes beyond real existence, for it is not its task to realize what it beholds. It does not act according to an Ought, it is not a freedom of necessity, as the Ought is.⁷⁹ Artistic freedom is the opposite, the freedom of possibility – indeed of perfectly unlimited possibilities – for, within its domain, which exhausts itself in appearance and does not strive after reality, nothing at all is realized. The direction of its modality is the offsetting of reality.

The real miracle of this freedom is its power to let appear concretely the idea it has beheld. The artist declares the idea to be neither morality nor a command, nor even an ideal. Rather, he presents it to intuition as a living figure, which he lets act and speak for itself before the eyes of the observer. And just in that way it affects us convincingly – leading us, as it were, upward toward the desired human type. For (273) in morality it is not moralizing, pedantry, or admonitions that affect us, but always and alone the lucidly beheld model.

This leading of vision upward is, of course, no longer an aesthetical function of literature, but one that is moral, political, and cultural. Yet it demonstrates how genuine art is closely tied to life. It remains puzzling, however: only after we dispense with all metaphysics of form does this simple, clear, and deeply meaningful freedom of bestowing form autonomously become visible. Here lies the meta-aesthetical mystery of all great art.